Tron: Regenesis
by Ridyr
Summary: Post Legacy: Tron and Yori now lead a rag-tag group of programs in an effort to rebuild their devastated system. They are making progress, until some of Rinzler's old code is reborn in the form of an ISO- the first of a new generation... not all of which are born healthy. Featuring: Tron, Yori, Rinzler, Paige, Quorra, Sam, Lora, and Alan. M for violence, intensity, & some sexuality
1. Renaissance

I am a catalogue of memories.

I am a whirl of thoughts in the darkness, racing through space without being able to see where I'm going.

This is birth.

And it feels like drowning.

The first thing I feel is my fingers, closing around so much liquid, trying to grasp it and finding nothing. The next thing I feel are legs. Good legs. Strong legs. Warrior's legs. They are slow to move through this fluid, but powerful.

I'd like to know what they look like, but I can't open my eyes yet. Down here, I am still blind.

Blind but for the memories.

They are mine. . . but they're not. I can open the files to see them, and attached to them are feelings, but they may as well belong to this dark place I'm rising from for all means to me.

They do, really.

Nothing is mine but this body. This body and a name. It's an old name, something they used to call that jumble of basic code—all yellow and orange and broken—that I was made from, but I like it. It's going to be mine.

It always has been.

_Rinzler._

I am the result of a poisoned sea mixing with a broken program—the new, born from the schematics of the old. It suits me.

Me, the product of the raw materials of a basic and the power of endless potential.

Toxic, but unlimited, potential.

I can taste the poison here, the darkness of this place that should be so rich and so bright and so active. It is old poison, flushing itself out bit by bit; the sea is reverting around it. It is reverting and I am the first thing it has elected to produce. The beginning of a new generation, the vanguard of the new ISOs.

Our defenders are born first, now.

Not our leaders.

The sea has learned its lesson.

My head is spinning. I am waking up, and I want air. I can feel my newly formed body in the dark, the sea against my skin, and heat from my own illuminating circuits. Heat, and light. I am made up of heat and light and a dead program's memories, scrubbed away from the body that formed them cycles ago. I am forged from the memories of dying, of suddenly reverting to some former state, of leaving nothing of myself but a bad taste in the mouth of the _other _who crawled back out of the sea in the white-circuited body we once shared. I am heat and light and memory reformed. Reformed by the sea, and an absolutely carnal desire to _live._

There is a rush, now, a sudden upward sweep.

I don't know if I swim or if the sea throws me to the surface, and I don't _care._

What I care about is the way it feels to breathe; the way air feels in contrast to water as my head breaks through to the world above. I care about the way the leftovers of the sea drip and race down over my nose, my cheeks, how the droplets sizzle on hot circuits. I care about solid ground and what it feels like to brace my feet against it, how it feels to rise up, to unbend my knees and straighten my back and see the world from my full height, to stand for the first time.

This is birth.

And it feels like freedom.


	2. Thieves

Yori

* * *

"Yori, Tron, you're going to want to see this."

Radi rushes in, a blur of red hair and black clothing and circuits so dark you can hardly see them. Paige, who is the newest addition to our little group of rebels-turned-administrators, is behind her. I know nothing about the girl beyond the fact that she has proven useful because of her extensive medical and military experience, and a doggedness to rival even Tron's. She's changed her circuits from orange to green since coming to us, and it suits her.

At this moment, she is carrying a handheld view screen, a worried look dragging on her usually pretty features. Radi is beside her, looking the same way, her arms crossed over her chest. If the situation weren't so obviously something to be alarmed about, the similarity between the two would be truly amusing. Their hair falls in identical swoops over their eyes, and both have a way of looking their angriest when they are concerned: Radi's usual scowl verges on a grimace, and Paige looks as if she would like to stab the nearest program with something sharp.

Tron steps forward from beside me, and takes the tablet from her hand. His brow furrows as he examines it. "What am I looking at?"

Radi looks to Paige to explain, and the younger program inhales deeply before she speaks. Being around Tron makes her feel guilty, I suspect; she was certainly no help to him in the earliest days of Clu's rule, way back before something (what happened exactly she refuses to discuss with anyone,) turned her against him. I don't know a great deal about what she did in the cycles between then and now, but she's been aid enough to us that I really don't mind. We all have stories here… Even Tron is no exception.

He is looking at Paige expectantly, and she clears her throat to speak while I take the tablet from Tron's hands.

"We received a report earlier," she begins, "about a rogue program in the beta sector. Witnesses say he derezzed someone in a bar south of the line."

The line in this case refers to the theoretical border between the rebuilt, restored parts of the city and the western outskirts which are still degrading without Clu's oversight.

"Why'd he derezz the program?"

Violence past the line isn't unheard of—it's certainly no reason for them to look as troubled as they do. I glance at the tablet in my hands to see if it will tell me anything, and I can't help but gasp a little over the familiarity of the image, shock and alarm increasing the heat in my circuits. I'm looking at a reconstruction of the perpetrator from the shoulders up, (probably copied from someone's memory directly), and there is something disturbingly similar to the appearance of Clu's enforcers in the program's dress and posture. It's male, wearing a heavily tinted helmet. Three lines of circuitry are visible on its surface. One runs down the center of the forehead, and on either side over his temples. What's unusual about it, however, is the sharp angle of the helmet… rather like the one I made for Tron eight cycles ago, after we found each other again. It's pointed around the chin, but not so much as to limit its streamlined style, and it's less garish than what Rinzler used to wear.

Still stranger is the color of the circuits; I can't quite make up my mind as to whether what I'm seeing is dark orange or red. It's not a color I have ever seen before in a circuit, and since I tamper with color and structural code as my primary function, that's saying something. I can see why it alarmed Tron… The truth is, the program in the picture looks kind of like, like… well, I'd rather not think of who he reminds me of. That's ancient history now, and better left untouched, though the resemblance is troubling nonetheless.

As I mull over this, Paige continues relaying the witness accounts to Tron.

"Apparently the victim had a problem with Oranges." To me, this word still refers to those funny little round things Lora used to send me in the old system, but to everyone else it's the popular term for Clu's old enforcers because of the color of their circuits. Paige continues:

"He approached the program and began to antagonize him. The perpetrator ignored him, until the victim touched him. Then he turned around, pulled his disc, and derezzed the victim before anybody knew what had happened. The witnesses say they've never seen a program attack so quickly."

Tron looks troubled, but only nods. "Anything else?"

Paige shifts uncomfortably and glances at Radi, apparently hoping the veteran program will come to her aid. Radi looks away from Tron's face, towards the wall.

"Radi," he says sternly, and she grimaces but concedes, turning her head back towards us slowly as she begins to speak.

"Yeah, there's something. After he derezzed the program, he took an item from the leftovers."

Tron's expression darkens exponentially, and I can't help glancing back and forth between him, Paige, and Radi with what I'm sure must be a deeply concerned expression. This must be what has them so shaken—violence beyond the line is typical, but thieving from the derezzed is anything but.

"What did he take?" asks Tron, his voice heavier than I've heard in a long time.

Radi looks him squarely in the eye as she replies.

"His disc."

* * *

Rinzler

-One milicycle earlier-

* * *

I need a baton.

The walk from the sea to this blackened, decompiling corner of the city took longer than it was worth. I need a cycle. I don't think I like slow journeys. They're a waste.

. . . And I don't like having that much time to think.

I have too many old memories for that, memories that are easy to get lost in. There is no context surrounding them, but the images are enough.

I'm beginning to understand myself. _Being _is more complicated than it seemed at birth. That much I'm starting to understand.

_RINZLER._

I shake my head once, trying to bring my attention back to the drink in my hand. I'm sitting at the bar in some half decimated service facility. It might have been a club once, but there is no knowing now. Either way, I'm here: a drink in hand and my helmet retracted halfway up my face. It looks ridiculous, but it makes no difference to me. Better this than the uproar there will be if the basics I'm surrounded by see my face.

Never let them see your circuits. _Not if they__'__re on your skin._

The sea warned me of that.

So the helmet stays over the upper half of my face, where I do indeed have circuits. Revealing circuits. Circuits only ISOs bear. The insignia on my arm is masked, too, hidden beneath a solid band of orange-red circuitry that wraps around my forearm.

That color is going to cause trouble.

I can see that much in the eyes of the other programs in the bar. The basics around me are leaning around each other to have a look at me. They think they're subtle. They're not. But it makes no difference to me.

_Go ahead and stare._

Just so long as they leave me alone.

. . . Still, their eagerness is distracting. And pathetic.

I have to tune them out.

_Drink, Rinzler._

I do. I'm so thirsty I can hardly stand it. I down the remainder of the energy in my glass in one shot. The bartender gives me a strange look, like he doesn't trust me, as if _this_ is somehow alarming behavior.

_Just fill it._

He doesn't have to see my eyes to get the message. Glowering, he takes the glass and refills it, then slams it down on the table harder than necessary.

_Watch yourself, program._

I think it but don't say it. I crawled my way into existence less than a milicycle ago. I dragged myself out of the sea, and then _walked here_. I want to sit here, and recharge, and leave. I'm not in the mood to be confrontational. Or be confronted. Something the program behind me is clearly too dense to understand.

He's big for a basic, blue circuits. Ugly scar under his chin, visibly shattered silver pixels standing out against his skin.

"Hey, Orange."

_Don__'__t talk to me._

"I don't like your attitude."

I drink.

"You had better look at me when I'm talking to you, Orange. You shouldn't be here."

He steps closer. I can feel the heat of his circuits from here; feel the change in the air. I don't have to look behind me to know how he's moving, how he stands, where he'll go next… that he's going to do something stupid.

I finish my drink.

I don't look at him.

Still, I know that he's reaching for his baton, can sense it activating behind me. Lightblade, probably; maybe a short staff.

But threatening me is not his mistake.

The mistake is_ touching_ me.

He reaches out with his free hand, as if to spin me around on the barstool, and when his palm hits my shoulder, something in my head lights up. A hot, hot orange light, it comes hand in hand with a surging in my circuits like a bolt of electricity.

My helmet snaps down over my chin, and I twist out from under his hand. I tear his baton from his grip and draw my disc all in the same motion.

I don't give myself time to blink.

By the time I do, he's already dead.

There is a sort of broken, hollow shout as he derezzes, and then his body shatters across the floor, tumbling in every direction; little pale blue leftovers and a spinning, abandoned disc and nothing more. The pixels smell like burnt circuits.

Elsewhere in the bar, a program screams.

_. . . Time to go._

Still holding the baton, which is now glowing with my own red in my hand, I step down from the barstool. No one stops me from leaving.

They're _just_ smart enough not to try.

Something bumps against my foot as I step over the basic's remains, and I glance down. It's his disc.

…

There's a part of me that hates to leave it lying there.

It's not a small part.

_. . . That bunch of circuits I used to run around in had two of them, didn't he?_

That's reason enough for me.

I pick up the disc almost as an afterthought, and walk out of the bar.


	3. Retrospect

**_Author's note:_** So, there are some things in this chapter that I'm going to address for the sake of clarity before I even begin, the first being **Tron and Rinzler's measurements**. That sounds very random, I know, but **the topic will come up in passing in this chapter, so I think it's worth mentioning for the sake of context**.

So, I realize that in Legacy Tronzler didn't look all that big. This is because the actor in the suit stands at (or so the internet told me) six foot exactly with no lift on his shoes, while the body double for Jeff Bridges was 6'1" or 6'2" plus a heeled boot. In homage to the movies, in my head I am going to put Rinz's new ISO body at about 6'0" but will be keeping Bruce Boxleitner as a model for Tron, putting _him_ at 6'2". I also like the idea of him being slightly bulkier than Rinz. Though Bruce wasn't a _huge _guy, he was decently broad through the shoulder in his younger days, and Tron is a bit of a larger than life figure anyway. A strong build just sounds fitting for him, in my mind. Therefor, I am picturing a Tron who is solid, but not huge, and about 6'2" (188cm), and a Rinzler who is more of a"lean muscle" like we saw in Legacy, standing around 6' (183) cm.

Also, **regarding Beck,**I will try to sneak it some backstory/explanations of my headcanon regarding his whereabouts, but I beg of you to be patient with me, as all my narrative characters (Yori, Tron, Rinzler, and later Lora) are a little preoccupied at the moment, and I do not want to detract from the central narrative by trying to cram in a reason for one or another of them to muse over Beck's backstory. I will mention him at some point though, I promise!

**My thanks to:** Kayla,Scribe~Of~Red, and Jax Solo for beta-ing, and tumblr's Lightjetlady for helping me pick a chapter title.

And of course, my thanks to all of you for reading, and thank you especially for reviewing. I'm sorry for the long note, and I hope you enjoy this next chapter. ^^

_**-End of line**._

o0o0o0o0o

* * *

Tron

* * *

"What do you mean he _took his disc?_"

Radi looks at me with her usual pugnacious scowl, but I can see genuine worry in her eyes.

"I mean the witness report states that he paused on his way out, picked it up, and kept walking. Took the guy's baton, too, but that was before he derezzed him."

I don't like any part of what I'm hearing.

"I want a location and a name."

Radi groans, and even Yori winces. They know as well as I do that our tiny team of amateur administrators doesn't have the resources for a manhunt, but I want this one alive, and _now_. I want to know what makes a program steal a dead man's disc.

"I'll take Beta sector. Radi, get a team together. I want Mav on it. Start with the borders between Alpha, Gamma, and Beta and work inwards. I'll start at the bar. Go."

Radi gnashes her teeth for a moment and looks perturbed (as usual), but nods to me before turning on her heel and striding from the room. Paige follows her, nose tucked into the tablet, which she's taken back from Yori. Still beside me, my counterpart is looking at me with worried eyes.

"Well, this is just what we needed," she says.

I don't have anything to say in reply. I sort of snort at her instead, which she understands well enough. She tilts her chin down towards her chest and eyes me from under her lashes.

"Do what you can about it, Tron, but if you don't find him, we need you here. You can't chase this indefinitely. Promise me."

I turn and stare out the long window above the control panel as if to ignore her, but I ruin my own ruse with what was supposed to be a surreptitious glance at her over my shoulder. Yori wearing her fiercest expression, blonde hair fanning out from her face in every direction. She is dramatically beautiful, threatening, and completely unintimidating all at once. She's too small to be intimidating, really. But her eyes say what her mouth doesn't: that we're alarmingly shorthanded and behind schedule. We don't have time for me to do what I was programmed to do. No more than she has.

Yori was designed to be a building and prototyping program; she used to construct things (including things her user sent her that no program could identify). While Clu was in power, she moved on to personal upgrades and downloads for the revolution, making things on a smaller but equally vital scale, and now she's trying to plan the reconstruction of the entire system. After Clu's deresolution our infrastructure collapsed, and she's handling the logistical aspects of putting it all back together. _I__'__m_ supposed to be handling the re-establishment of law. Not that it's working, since I don't have time between _establishing _laws to _enforce_ them.

Radi, meanwhile, has been left with the odious task of coordinating the rest of our small team, which consists of a few horribly mismatched programs, none of which are still doing what they were written to do in the first place. It's a miracle the citizens of this system haven't come and overthrown _us._

_If we don__'__t catch this death-robber, they very well might_.

There are only so many behaviors they'll tolerate, especially from Oranges (the "you cannot derezz someone because of the color of their circuits" rule is one of the many I'm barely holding together). A rogue Orange will meet a nasty end, no question about that, and he'll take us all with him when he does. The system is stabilizing now (it's been eight cycles since Clu fell—it ought to be), but it's still fragile. The last thing we are prepared to handle is an uncalculated factor like this.

"Yori, this—"

"Tron, please don't try to tell me it takes precedence. I've got whole sectors that still don't have access to power, no solar sailor or cargo transit system of any kind for any of the outlying cities, and half of Argon went down in a power surge in the last five milicycles. Don't try to tell me that this i—"

"Power surge?"

I don't mean to cut her off, but the words are out of my mouth before I can stop myself. She twists up her expression into something that might have been a grimace if it weren't so smug, and nods.

"Massive. It started at the docks and darkened 80% of Beta quadrant and 99% of Delta before it stopped. Something is happening in the Sea of Simulation. I was hoping I could wait to deal with it after I'd at least gotten transportation reinstalled, but I'm going to have to have a look if this keeps up."

A yellow warning icon and a line of ones and zeros scrolls quickly through my head.

_Keyword: Sea—assessment commencing—_

I've taken a plunge into the sea before. It's not an environment I like. No natural feature should feel like it has an energy of its own. If it doesn't have circuits,_ it shouldn__'__t feel alive_. It's that easy.

When it spat me back out, I was wet and cold and I felt like I'd had 1,000 cycles worth of cognitive processing and emotional files wiped right out of my system. For every two things I have a technical record of doing, I am missing at least one file's worth of context. An inanimate environmental feature shouldn't be able to tear out one personality and reboot another, discs or no discs, recent personal revelation or not. Not as easily as it did to me. I'm not sorry to be rid of Rinzler, and I appreciate that it did that for me, but _I don__'__t trust the sea._

The idea of Yori sticking her hands in it to take samples bothers me in the extreme.

"Send some analytical programs to look at it. Take Amp and Mole off of energy refinement for a milicycle."

She crosses his arms over her chest.

"Tron, don't give me orders."

I falter, re-evaluating my phrasing. My expression as I do this—which probably looks to her like a confused mix of chagrin, discomfort, and irritation—seems to amuse her, because her firm countenance crinkles into a poorly contained smile. It's a tired smile, but a smile. She lets me puzzle over that for a moment before speaking again. When she does, her voice is heavy.

"You don't have to worry," she concedes with a sigh, "I don't have time do it myself anyway. I'll send whoever I can find, when I can find them. Maybe that can be your job after you catch that rogue program…"

I grimace, and she grins deviously.

"I hope you're kidding, Yori."

She shrugs.

"Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. You'll find out when you get back. Now, go on. Just don't be too long. We need you _here_. Ok?"

"All right."

I reach out, and cradle her face in my hand for a moment, then turn to go. I leave her standing there, a hand on her hip, a seemingly endless list of functions waiting to be executed scrolling across the control panel beside her.

Flynn once told me that there is "no rest for the wicked." I'm beginning to understand what that means.

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

From where I'm sitting I can see the last administrative program pull up to the bar. She's easy to spot, her circuits turned down so dark that the lightribbon of her cycle looks dull gray from the air.

I am perched on the roof of a building not one block from where I killed the basic. The structure is in a state of disuse so extreme that the doors no longer function, even when unlocked, every light inside of it having gone dark many cycles ago. I had to scale the broken ruins of the building that used to stand beside it in addition to using a light cable to reach the top. But now that I'm here, it's perfect.

I can see everything, and they have no idea I'm even in this sector.

It is said the programs who run the system now are reaching far outside of the scope of their own programming. That's the rumor that was whispered in the bar and on the streets as I was walking in. It's true.

They are surviving, nothing more.

That much is obvious from here.

There are three administrators outside of the bar now. One is tall, broad shouldered, and white-circuited. He wears a helmet almost as consistently as I do. The other two programs include the redheaded female with the dark circuits, and another male, smaller than the first. Despite his best efforts to mask his true colors, his disc glows orange in the midst of his white circuits.

I can't find a memory of a more incongruous group of programs in either of my discs.

I turn my attention back to the one in my hand. I have it open, lines of simple blue code hovering in the air above it. I could override it without any great deal of effort. Even in my old body I could have done that.

But I want to clear it out by hand, first.

That's even easier.

_Their code is so simple…_

I flip through code as if it is nothing, searching for valuable files and upgrades and information. Mostly I meet with disappointment.

There's very little here I can use.

Reaching in with my free hand, I push aside a jumble of code pertaining to transport schedules and cargo manifests in favor of an engineering and mechanics upgrade. Technical skills could be valuable.

Those can stay.

Absently, I wrap a fist around the transport files and drop them for deletion. A progress bar flickers for a moment as they disappear. Shipping must have been his original function, because that does away with 60% of the contents of his disc.

All that remains are physical upgrades and personal files.

The physical upgrades are excessive. Why anyone would want to try to move in a body that bulky I cannot comprehend.

_Ridiculous._

I throw those files out altogether, ripping them away from the disc and crushing them in my hand. Damaged, the disc deletes them on its own.

The personal files are more complicated.

The sea may be able to separate context from memory and feeling from thought, but I am not nearly so capable. I settle with sorting the files by title, going through them one by one.

_Personal file: title: Lana (subtitle 'counterpart')_

No.

_Personal file: title: circuit upgrades (subtitle 'interface' subtitle 'appearance')_

Absolutely not.

_Personal file: title: disc wars (subtitle 'techniques' subtitle 'study')—keywords: audience, spectator, Rinzler, battle, observational._

. . . . .

_Leave it, Rinzler._

But it's so tempting.

These are old memories, old files, technical studies of an older me. And I'm curious.

I want to know what I looked like.

I want to know how all of that code the sea copied me from behaved in some basic's body. I want to see whom I was made from… _who I am_… who I was.

The line is between basic-Rinzler and myself is hazy.

I'd like to remedy that.

I open the file. A series of audio input records unfold in the air above the disc, all shades of blue and gray. The relevant colors and sounds for the scenes are stored separately. They won't play together when viewing them through a disc.

Not on a basic disk, anyway.

The memory looks up at two programs on a broad, flat platform. The first is uninteresting. It fights in a blocky, uncoordinated way that holds absolutely no interest for me whatsoever.

. . . The second program I recognize immediately.

_I used to be taller._

Basic-Rinzler moved stiffly on the ground, walking as if his legs were reluctant to go where he asked them to, shoulders rolled forward aggressively, head held so low it looked weighted. How the program whose memories these are—how _anyone__—_failed to see how twisted he was is _pathetic. _

Every line of his body was warped.

Every turn of his head.

Every. Single. Step.

And no one cared. It angers me. It _infuriates _me. Watching him stand, watching him walk—and knowing how many programs looked on as it happened—is embarrassing and painful all at once.

But then the memory fast forwards. _Then_ he leaves the ground.

It is now that I can see myself in him.

I haven't lost my passion for aerodynamics. The turns, the leaps, the purposefully narrow avoidances and quick jabs he favored are as commendable in my eyes now as they were then. That way of fightingwas so innate to me that even the sea couldn't, or wouldn't, change it.

That it changed everything else is a blessing.

Clip after short clip, move after move, I watch myself through the dead basic's eyes, and remember.

I remember how it felt to kill for fun. I remember how it felt to kill because it's all I knew how to do. I remember the agony it put me through to do so for the first time and how quickly that reluctance was stamped out of me by my own programming. I remember how _exhilarating _it became.

I remember _fighting_.

I remember broken pixels and the thrill of matching myself against a skilled opponent. Of watching him fall all the same, never good enough.

I remember the games.

They were closest thing I ever felt to freedom.

I remember hunting rogues and strays and ISOs in the streets, too. I remember cutting down my own predecessors without any comprehension of the fact— without understanding how that made me a murderer. Without caring. I remember carving the circuits out of their faces because Clu wanted them tortured, not killed.

I remember them screaming.

_NO._

I close my eyes, look away. Shake my head as if to chase understanding back to nothing.

_I don't want to remember this._

My own circuits seem too hot, long burning scars across my temples, down my forehead. I don't know how to process guilt like this.

It turns to anger instead. Heavy, gnawing, viscous anger that lurks deep in my circuits with a mind of its own. I understand anger. I always have.

Better anger than pain.

. . .

Anger isn't rational, but it's functional. Anger is defiant.

Anger feels like liberation, even where there's none. I remember feeling free while Clu distorted my rage. Remember how independent I was. How I thought I was. I thought I was tasting freedom while I was twisted, breaking, bending, warping, killing killing killing all because he told me to.

Because I could.

Because I liked it.

Because he _made me like it._

I liked the sounds of their screams.

_RINZLER._

I liked the way the pixels in their faces shattered, how circuits smoked against a spinning disc, liked the dread in their eyes.

_RINZLER, STOP IT._

They always knew they were going to die, in the end. When I was done with them.

_LEAVE. IT. ALONE._

I found it gratifying.

_Stop stop stop…_

Remembering hurts me. Remembering is agony. But I remember because I can. Because I can't. I can't stop.

I have to understand.

I tortured them. I slaughtered them. I was a slave and a sufferer and I made them share in my torment. That was the only freedom I had: How fast, how slow, how painful a death could I give? How many ISOs could I punish for living—for being what we are?

We are not a stabilizing element.

We are unrestricted, beautiful chaos.

And I killed us—killed the others—over what we cannot help. Over that price for our autonomy.

. . . I want to kill something now.

I am filling up with hate and rage and loathing and I want to take it out on something, take it out because I can, not because Clu is coercing me, not because it's what I was designed for. I have a _choice,_ now, and I want to kill something.

I feel like I want to kill something . . .

I am shaking.

I am shaking, all full of loathing, and I have to let it out. I have to dispel it. Have to do _something, _break _something _besides myself. Break it because I can.

Because I have a choice.

Basic-Rinzler killed ISOs because he hated them. He hated them because he was _supposed to._ Because that's how he was made to think. Programmed. Manipulated. Pre-determined.

_Not anymore._

NOT ANYMORE.

I _choose_ anger.

I _choose _defiance.

I've had enough of this memory. I've had enough of this disc. I've had enough of myself.

I reach into the depths of the disc's contents, closing my fingers around files that have so little substance they seem to disappear in my hand. I twist. I tear. Code breaks and I crush it in my hand, the last echo of its content dissipating and disappearing on the breeze.

_Good riddance._

I don't want to see any more.

I'd rather not know.

The last of the basic's useless files gone, I close my hand around the disc, chasing away the last echoes of guilt and horror and self-loathing and memory with the feeling of a sharp edge on a soft palm, chasing them away into the dark parts of my code where I don't have to see them as the disc activates.

Overriding it is so _easy _for me.

In an instant, it is not blue, but red. All mine.

_All mine._

* * *

Tron

* * *

"Nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing?"

Radi looks as mad as I've ever seen her, having just taken longer than anyone to patrol her appointed sector. However, that this is her response to 'what did you find?' is exasperating regardless of the amount of effort she made. She is a program of few words and abundant attitude, and she is as irritating as she is effective.

"_I mean_ there wasn't a single trace, or a single witness, in the entire sector. Either he masked his circuits, took off the creepy helmet, and made a run for it or he never left."

I grimace beneath my own helmet, where she can't see. I've considered this possibility, and it's not one that I like. A murderer who can hide under my nose is . . . unacceptable. But so little in the way of results from our searching seems to support her theory . . . whether I personally would like to admit to it or not.

Mav, however, is too blunt and too . . . _optimistic _to be deterred by any such possibility. In his mind, a killer who hasn't gone far is a killer that is close enough to catch, and he raises a speculative eyebrow as he looks back and forth between the two of us.

"Do we have the resources for a perimeter sweep of the area, then?"

There is no real reason for me to snap at him, but something about the simple nature of the suggestion irritates me. Something about this entire situation is . . . _off _somehow, and my patience is running thin already. The entire system, from the ground beneath my feet to the air around me, seems to be resonating at too high a frequency, something dark and heavy and electric in the atmosphere that is too _unstable _to be trusted. Whether I should be or not, I am terse with him when I reply:

"Resources? Yeah, three of them: You, me, and Radi."

His expression—which is usually highly approachable—actually flattens. It's an unusual look for the habitually even-tempered program. He stares at me from under his shaggy medium blond hair with flat gray eyes, his natural orange flashing in irritation under the white circuit-mask he wears when he works beyond the line. Once an elite member of the Black Guard, he turned traitor and fled about 600 cycles into Clu's reign, right about the time the repurposes began. He escaped with his mind intact, but never lost his color, which makes him a target for the angry and the misguided.

The other thing he never lost was his sense of technique. He's a fighter, not a planner, and he's used to a battalion, not a trio.

I should go easier on him.

Or correct myself.

Radi, however, interjects before I can say anything to that effect.

"We've all done sweeps as we've come in," she says, her tone no kinder than mine. "We need eyes in the air."

This pulls me from my reverie.

"Jets." I order the word with more aggression than I ought to, and I have to work to soften my voice as I continue. "We can take jets."

Radi grimaces. Mav grins. I turn wordlessly on my heel and motion for them to follow. Jets are best started from on high. We need a roof.

As I turn towards the now-empty bar and the promise of roof access, something catches my eye. Down the block, cutting dangerously between ruined buildings, there is a flash of reddish orange.

* * *

Rinzler

-moments ago-

* * *

Memories are not easy to ignore now that I have them. They nag, and cling.

Relentless.

The dead basic's last revenge.

As I look out over the side of the building, I see nothing. The images keep leaking into my head despite my best efforts to ignore them, and they are all I can focus on. I can control my reaction though, now. I know what's coming, and there is no panic, no breakdown when it arrives.

But memory.

Memory won't leave me alone.

I was better at denial as a basic. Simpler code: Simpler solutions. More firewalls, less freedom. This ISO mind has no such restrictions. Memories arise on their own, and _they do not stop. _I can steady myself. I can cope. But I am still up here, frozen in remembering. Whether I want to or not.

Unbidden, yet another flash of recollection moves through my vision, a reminder of the way those ISOs looked at me before I killed them, how—past the fear in their eyes—they stared up into the empty black surface of my helmet as if knew me better than I knew myself. Maybe they recognized Tron beneath the twisted mask that I was, maybe they recognized their sibling-to-be. Even through the anger that is already present -hot and red and blinding in my head- this thought hurts me. It tortures me to my core.

I _try _to ignore it.

I can't.

Instead of deleting the file, or blocking it out, my mind merely wanders from one difficult subject to another, skimming over files to a more recent event. The new thought I settle on is not much better.

_Now_ I remember dying.

I cannot and do not want to comprehend how I feel about this.

On the inside, I'm thrashing, clawing, fighting it away. Chaos. On the outside, I'm scowling at nothing, sitting on the ground with my back to a wall, spinning my new disc restlessly in my hand. Passive. Neither defensive or offensive saves me; I try to ignore this memory, too, but I can't.

_Ending _is not something I will ever forget.

I can recall tasting freedom, only to be knocked from the sky, to find myself drowning while _he _took over. While he chased me out of the only body I'd ever known. The body he'd wasted. The body he'd allowed to be taken from him, taken to create me.

I remember everything turning to black, and then nothing.

_. . . Empty._

I was nothing.

I was dead code in the depths, rejected by his—our—_my own body. _And I was gone. It was over and I was gone and there was nothing left and nothing to think about and nothing to feel because _I didn__'__t exist._

But the world wasn't done with me, wouldn't let me go. Wouldn't let me die.

The _sea_ wasn't done with me. It is potential, and it read potential in the remnants of me. It is creation in liquid form, and I am what it made to protect its unborn children.

_Error._

No, not its children. Not role is more specific than that. I will understand it better when the others are born. It is too soon now. I am too young, too new. I will know my charge when I see it. It's easy to make sense of things when they're right in front of you.

This entire system is evidence of that.

I've been in existence for less than three milicyces and I can already see through it to its scarred, decrepit core. I could almost laugh at the naiveté of the administrators below, flinching away from the frustrated words of their faceless white-garbed leader. His gestures betray his mood, despite the screen of his helmet and the distance from which I watch. He is authoritative, big and strong and old and worn; obviously well designed for command but poorly programed in diplomacy. There is no sympathy in the hard set of his shoulders or the way he holds his hands in fists at his sides.

I don't like him.

I don't know his name, nor do I recognize the minimalized patterns of his circuitry (although they are familiar enough to suggest it is only some subtle alteration of his clothing—not a full replacement—that protects his identity), but I don't like him.

I _hate _him_._

I hate him with every voxel and circuit of my body, in the deepest lines of code, the echoes of my basic self which I was built around. I hate him in my very essence, hate him from my core.

My hand twitches around the disc I am holding, the urge to hurtle it at him almost more than I can stand, even at this preposterous distance. My thoughts are a jumble.

_KIllhim…DEREZZHIM—Take his life—take it take it take it . . ._

My hand closes so tightly around the edge of the disc that it almost cuts into my palm. But I don't activate it.

Killing is easy. . . But even I need a reason.

At least to do it from here.

If he ever does find me, he will not walk away unscathed… whoever he is. I am so certain that I know him, but until he has a name, I can justify nothing. For now he is safe beneath his mask.

He'd do well to never take that helmet off.

_Just like me._

. . .

_JUST like me._

With that thought, recognition slams through my code. My hand freezes around the disc I had been spinning so absently a moment before.

_I know that body._

I know that body because it was _mine. _

I can't see his insignia from here, but it must be there, I am _certain _it is there. The pattern on his chest. Four innocuous little squares. I know who he is. New circuits can't hide those gestures. I know that mind.

_Tron._

Tron survived.

_. . .Of course he did_.

When I was drowning, my systems failing, the sea closing in around me and the light disappearing and my circuits shorting. . . Tron was _living._

_. . . . . KILLHIM._

I can think of nothing I would like more. I want to watch my basic body breaking, watch the pale circuits smoking, watch as he turns to pixels under my disc, turns to nothing in my grip. To break his discs—_mydiscs__—_with me heel… tiny, crunching, broken pixels. . .

But I can't do it. I lunge, rising halfway to my feet, disc clenched in my hand, but I can go no farther. Not yet. The time is still wrong, as wrong as it was a micro ago before I recognized him. It's all wrong and I know it's wrong and I can't fight what I know. Not with how I know it. I _know_ that now is wrong. I don't have to understand why. I just _understand,_ as if the whole system is screaming in my ear to restrain myself. I can't kill Tron. Not here, not now. Not yet.

The basics say we're naïve.

We're not.

I know that I have to go.

_. . .Have to leave . . ._

If I don't, I _will _kill him. I have the ability to make a choice, to let him live. But that doesn't mean I have the willpower.

I deposit the new disc on my back, snapping it roughly into place as I reach for my new baton with my free hand. Lightjets are obvious, but the administrators are grounded. I'll be gone before they can even reach the air.

Without stopping to consider what I'm doing, I dive headlong over the edge of the building, plunging towards the ground.

. . . This is the first time this body has used a baton.

My reaction time is not what it should be.

The street below races towards me, faster than it seems like it should, and my baton does nothing.

_Come on._

_. . ._

I can see the cracks in the pixels where the sidewalk is breaking apart. It's getting closer.

_COME ON._

Too close.

It'd be pathetic to die so soon, when I am still so new. . .

_lightjetlightjetlightjetLIGH TJET I AM NOT DYING YET-_

Willpower is everything.

The jet suddenly rezzes up beneath me, that color that isn't sure if it's orange or red lighting up the sky as I redirect my nosedive. It's a sharp gesture. I am an aggressive, forceful flyer.

But I _am_ flying.

I am flying, and soon, Tron will be far behind.


	4. Dogfights

Tron

* * *

My scanners screaming, yellow alerts cluttering my vision, the rogue diminishing to little more than a blur on the horizon, I don't make it as far as the roof. Two flights up I break through a window and jump, almost hitting the ground before my jet rezzes up. If these things didn't get all manner of debris in their engines and flip themselves over nine times out of ten when they're near the ground, I'd have taken off from where I was standing, but they do.

The escapade of getting into the air has put me behind already.

Mav has committed to flying, but has opted out of the alarmingly short two story drop, putting me two blocks ahead before he's even airborne. Radi hates flying, and has elected to use her cycle. She is tailing the rogue program from the ground, but quickly falls behind.

I abandon them both, soaring ahead, up and over the tops of the buildings, looking down at the city below. The eerie red-orange circuits of the disc-thieving rogue are visible beneath me. He's decided to fly low: weaving in and out of buildings not far above street level, cutting dangerously through narrow alleys, disappearing between buildings.

His flying is… weird.

He banks too hard, and has to roll just to make corners that he takes too sharply, and yet his control is impressive. He understands the jet and it responds to him with disquieting accuracy. It's the flying itself that's hard for him, as if he understands the machine but not the aerodynamics, how to move but not _when. _Like he _knows_ how to fly . . . but has never tried.

It doesn't make sense.

I don't dive immediately. Instead I watch him from above with a nagging sense of fascination, following him with my eyes more than my jet as he dives between buildings and under archways, around broken street lamps and piles of rubble from half-collapsing buildings. I could descend, could chase him through the streets where my more experienced flying would give me the upper hand, but part of me is curious to see where he goes, what he'll do. There's something strange about him –a creeping familiarity mixed with a complete and utter lack of recognition— that makes him more interesting to me than a criminal should be.

These are disturbing thoughts, thoughts I shouldn't be trusting. My systems respond to them with a series of warnings and alerts, but I ignore the cacophony. I continue to watch, expecting him to appear again just after the next building, to emerge from each alleyway where I can see him, thinking I have the advantage, thinking he cannot have spotted me way up here, that he's mine for the taking. But then he disappears.

He rolls, flying almost sideways into yet another narrow back street, disappearing behind a large, low building without emerging again on the other side. I send my own jet plunging towards the place where he's vanished, discomforted and irritated by the idea of him being out of my sight.

_Bit-brain probably crashed, flying like that._

He'll probably be on the ground when I get there, actually. It will be the easiest arrest I've ever made. . .

In the next instant something collides with my jet.

My starboard engine is smoking before I've even finished processing the audio input from shot, the rogue program dropping back before I have the chance to return the favor –to put a hole in his jet— as I would very much like to do. Up close, his circuits are more red than orange, and there is a meanness in his body language, in how he turns his head to look at me and flies with his body so low on his jet that he looks like he's growing out of the machinery. Everything about him is wrong. Cruel.

…Familiar.

_ERROR—_

_How . . . ?_

_Processing-_

_. . . Where did he come from?_

I know these streets. I know this city. How he got up here without me seeing him . . . it doesn't make_ any sense._ Neither does the speed at which he accelerates again, drawing alongside my jet but keeping just out of arms reach, watching me with an intensity I can _feel_. I roll away from him, but he follows the movement exactly, flying in a wide arc to follow the drastic twist of my own jet. He moves as if he knows where I'm going to go, what I'm going to do, before I do.

The next thing I know he is flying around me in a concentric spiral, winding his lightribbon around me at a breakneck speed that no one should be able to control, spinning his jet end over end in an ever-narrowing corkscrew, closing the ribbon around me.

There is no way out.

In an instant, I am trapped. Another nano and my jet is derezzing beneath me, and I am falling, narrowly missing the ribbon myself, plunging towards the ground as the rogue shoots away across the sky, a red-orange blur that disappears in the darkness over the outlands.

I have a second baton. I can save myself, but not in time to catch him.

He's gone.

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

I enjoy watching him fall. I like seeing him plunging towards the ground, like the thought of him falling falling falling and then _breaking _on the street below.

But he saves himself. Of course.

He always does.

_Oh well._

He's not my problem right now.

My problem is where to go from here. I have full power. I have discs. I have a baton. I have the absolute freedom to do whatever I like.

…_what do I like?_

I'm still so new that I have no idea.

* * *

Yori

-A short time later-

* * *

This is bad. This is really, horribly, exactly the opposite of what I needed in my life. I have half the system to rebuild, starting with the transportation systems for the materials I'll need to do it and ending with the difficulty of finding programs to help me do the actual _building_, and I can't lift a finger to start because Tron is using _every single control panel in the room._

And do I get an explanation as to why? Of course not. Tron's exact words as he was barreling past me to the systems operation station where _I _work were "He got away." That's it. Radi is muttering angrily to Mav out in the hallway about how much having a rogue program on the grid irritates _her, _and I am relying on Paige of all people to paraphrase what Radi told her on her way in.

"Apparently," she tells me, crossing her arms over her chest, "he knocked Tron right out of the sky and then just flew off. We can assume he was probably more concerned with escaping than anything else because he didn't turn around when Tron rezzed up another jet, but it was a fairly vicious attack… according to Radi."

"How do you mean?"

"He had a clear shot, but used his lightribbon instead. I would imagine he was trying to make a point."

For some reason, that comment sends a shiver through my circuits.

"Or he just likes a spectacle."

Paige's eyes narrow, and she cocks her head a little, tossing her hair out of her eye to look at me. I simply shake my head.

"Never mind. I don't know what I'm talking about," I sigh, glancing away from her, "Tron, what are you doing over there anyway?"

"Trying to figure out where he was going," he grumbles. Sure enough, a comprehensive blueprint of the entire system is spread out on the screen in front of him. "There is _nothing _out there. . ."

A little blinking red dot on the screen indicates the rogue program's trajectory. Tron City (we almost always refer to it as "The City" because the whole thing makes Tron vehemently uncomfortable) is surrounded on all sides but one by other large urban centers, but the rogue is flying in the opposite direction of all of them. The only thing out that way is outlands. Flynn's hideout used to be there, too, but Tron locked it down almost immediately upon returning to his original programming. Long story short, he's right. There is nothing in that direction.

"Except the Arjia ruins," interjects Paige beside me. Lost in my own reverie, I've half-forgotten she's there, and I'm startled by her voice. Tron turns around and stares at her, looking her up and down as if he's re-evaluating her programming. She shrugs, and throws her weight onto her right leg so that her left seems to be on display, her arms still crossed. That pose, which looks forced to me, is actually a favorite of hers that she falls into unconsciously on a fairly regular basis.

"That wouldn't be a bad place to hide, actually," she muses, "with so much rubble on hand a determined program could easily make a shelter, and there are power wells not far from there. It would be unrefined, but . . ."

Unrefined power is strong enough to peel the wireframe right out of a building, but a program can run on it for several milicycles at a time. It was all we had back in the old system, and Tron and I drink it all the time. It wouldn't seem all that impractical to an outlaw on the run.

Judging by the deeply concerned look on Tron's face (he always looks a bit bad-tempered when he's really worried about something), I can tell that he's thinking the exact same thing that I am: Paige is right. He isn't thrilled with the idea of searching the city, and I don't blame him; Arjia was once home to more than 500,000 programs and the ruins are extensive. Clu hated the ISOs too much to go near it long enough to clean it up, and even if he had wanted to, it was _infested _with gridbugs for several cycles following the Purge. If there is a perfect hiding place in this system, Arjia is it, and searching it is going to take more time and resources than we can possibly spare.

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

I don't know where I'm going.

There is _nothing _I can see below me that's worth landing for, but I can't bring myself to turn around. Something out there in the dark is calling me, luring me in. I've given up on trying to come up with any one purpose to apply myself towards, and have been flying aimlessly for almost a quarter milicycle without a thought in my head.

Nothing.

Just endless, scrolling code.

Code and instinct. Not directive, not requirement. Freedom, aimlessness, and the need to see the place which is out there in the darkness calling me. There is no making sense of freedom, of choice. I tried to come up with something I _should _be doing, something I _could _do next. I tried to ask myself what I _wanted_ from life.

It didn't work.

_Directives were easier._

_. . ._

This is better.

I just need to give it time. Give _me_ time.

Patience, not code. Not orders. Patience and instinct and desire. That is what will provide me with my purpose.

I will wait.

I will wait and I will follow the compulsions I can't explain. I will fly into the outlands until I reach the end of the system and there is nothing left to see but cold and empty gridscape, so many dull white lines spread out over eternity, if I have to. But there is no turning around.

The system has something to show me.

I am going to look.

* * *

**Author's note: **Many thanks to Cyberbutterfly for editing this chapter! Here's hoping you're all enjoying where this is going, and as always, thank you for reading.

-End of line.


	5. Gridbugs

Rinzler

* * *

The city unfolds before me, a monument to our failings. A sea to mirror the one I've just left, this one made of directionless energy and cold rubble. Dirty silver turned to dusty gray.

This is Arjia.

I have fragments of memory from this place. Most of them involve ISOs dying at the end of my arm, running into my disc. Crumbling under the tires of my cycle. Screaming.

That's what happened to the strays.

What happened to the city itself, however, was Clu's doing; Clu and the gridbugs. Even they've run out of sustenance by now, but I can see the marks, the gashes, the deep punctures in the broken infrastructure from their jaws. Hungry, ugly creatures. They feed on entropy, on uncertainty.

_On everything _we_ build._

Clu let them come. He saw them as a clean-up crew. Let them swallow the ISO disease. Swallow the shining city. Make it so no one will come back.

_I'VE come back._

Basic-Rinzler's greatest failure among many was letting Clu live, for not defying him outright. I almost wish he were here now, so that _I _could see his expression as I set foot on this old ground in this new body in this city that refuses to die. So I could see his face before _I_ removed his head from his body… or could stretch him out tight and saw off his limbs and watch him crumble. Listen to him scream.

But he's gone.

He's gone, and I am here, looking at what he left behind.

The ground here is cold, rolling mist up to my knees. I can't see the street beneath my boots, moving as if alive in a place that is utterly dead. I like Arjia, in a hardened, heavy way. A fallen city. Dismissed and destroyed but defiant, the glimmer of its leftovers not entirely ruined by the dust. Desolate, lonely, safe in its abandonment. Tron may have his city.

This one is mine.

It is now, anyway. The last time I was here, I was a prisoner.

_Not anymore._

My helmet falls away. The air is cold against my skin. Biting, stinging pinpricks of cold and too bright light. Long, drifting, shifting and aimless, white energy sifts through the mist and through the air, leaking away at random into the stillness in a dull white glow. It illuminates the ruins. The brokenness of everything, the severed lines of code impaling the belly of the darkened sky, the last fragments of skyscrapers.

This was a beautiful city. Now it is a wasteland.

Our wasteland.

A hot, blinding surge runs through my circuits. I can picture them here. The others. They will come and we will claim this, _I _will claim this, and it will never fall again. I can picture it so clearly for a moment, and then it's gone, and I am alone.

_. . ._

Or at least, I should be.

Something is coming. I can't see them, but I can sense them. They are coming, creeping in on the horizon from the outlands, tempted by my presence, a hundred thundering feet against the ground, some fifty beating wings tearing up the air.

* * *

Tron

* * *

An alarm sounds, and Yori rushes to my side, sweeping her hands over the control to open the system alert which is flashing in the corner of every screen.

_Threat identified,_ it reads, _type 225-GRDB-02 location: Arjia—_

I'm getting old and slow. Yori recognizes the code before I do, and her expression shrinks, her mouth turning to a white-lipped 'O' that makes her eyes look enormous by comparison.

"That's impossible," she says, hands flitting frantically over the controls, fingers typing furiously, code flashing erratically across the screen. I have to take both her wrists in my hands and hold them away from the screen just to give myself time to read what's in front of me.

_Threat type 225-GDRB-02 identification: processing—_

_Processing—_

_Threat identified—_

Yori says it at the same time that I do:

"Gridbugs."

* * *

Yori

* * *

That's it.

Something is wrong.

The blackouts were troubling, the rogue is an unwanted anomaly, but this? This is it. This more than anything _doesn't make sense_. Gridbugs? We haven't seen a gridbug in that part of the system once in the last eight cycles, and now, out of nowhere, what looks to be a swarm of about twenty is charging the ruins of Arjia from… wherever it is that bugs come from, out in the undefined borders of the system. They've already eaten EVERYTHING there of value, and there is no reason they should come back. Not to Arjia. Not _now. _ But they're coming, and coming fast; as if something has landed there that they want.

But what could be out there that they'd want so badly? That could be that appetizing? The only new feature out there that the admin systems can account for is a rogue program, and one program shouldn't change anything... rogue or not. But that's the only thing I can think of, the only thing that makes sense based on the data that we have.

_. . . But why would gridbugs be attracted to a program?_

The only _programs _whose presence they ever responded to specifically were the IS—

_NO._

But, the blackouts along the coast. . .

_NO. WAY._

I force the thought away, bury it where it can't be found. It's preposterous, and impossible, and far more than I am willing to deal with on top of everything else. The ISOs are dead. Just like Clu and Flynn and Rinzler, they're gone, they are never coming back, and I refuse to believe otherwise.

. . . But if they _could _come back, wouldn't that mean—

_**STOP IT,**__ Yori. You're being ridiculous._

A little orange light flashes in my head, nagging at me like a memory that I refuse to open.

_YORI._

I look back at my control panel, and force it away.


	6. Communion

Rinzler

* * *

Gridbugs.

There are twenty of them, monstrous and gray-green with jaws wide enough to snap me in two, hurtling in from some black place on the horizon. Crawling over the wreckage of what little they haven't already eaten.

They are looking at me. Staring with glassy, multifaceted eyes. Tiny, beady, barely visible, low on their ugly square heads eyes. I can see my reflection in them as they draw closer, stirring up the mist and fog around their barbed feet, throwing it aside, the swirling light tossing their ugly silhouettes against the few remaining walls.

I draw my disc. And my baton, shifting through its contents. It's equipped with a double bladed staff.

_Delightful._

One staff, one disc. One program. Twenty bugs.

In another time, another body, I've seen worse.

* * *

Tron

* * *

The gridbugs look like twenty little red dots on my jet's radar, harmless on screen, deadly and impossibly destructive on the ground. I doubt that the rogue will be alive when we get there.

_. . . Error-_

I hate the way that word looks as it flashes across my eyes, the way the warning sounds in my head. It tastes like a bad memory, and I don't like what it suggests. Any normal program would be annihilated by this many bugs in a few nanoseconds, this one should be no different. There is no reason for us to find anything but his half chewed leftovers.

Just as there was no reason for him to be able out-fly me.

As we fly over Arjia, I'm not sure if I'm stunned or satisfied by what we find. Alone on the ground, with a staff and a disc and talent for aerobatics that turns my mouth sour for some reason I can't explain, the rogue is cutting down the bugs . . . even as they close in around him.

Paige and Radi are in a lightchopper far behind me, with Mav and another program –Greshim— flanking us. They follow my dive as I spiral towards the rogue below us, suddenly, incomprehensibly eager, but with alarms ringing in my head. I want to know what it is about this program –who's kicking .spiraling motions, and disturbingly aggressive jabs have felled four of the ugly creatures already—that so intrigues me.

I want to know why he stole a dead man's disc. I want to know why he took the time to tease me when he could have derezzed me.

I want to know why every move he makes reminds me of a darker version of myself.

I switch on the intercom in my helmet as we plunge towards the ground.

"Aim for the bugs. ONLY the bugs."

"Sir?"

"I want the program alive."

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

They make a sound like screaming, a grating broken data noise from a yawning rectangular mouth between dark, purple-tinged mandibles. They don't look like living creatures. They look hard, like the dull siding on the broken buildings around me, with sharp, hinge jointed legs, like machinery instead of organisms.

And all they do is eat.

They _want _to eat me. Like they ate our city and the broken pixels of the dead, like they chewed through the wreckage that Clu left behind, like they swallowed up Arjia and the legacy of the ISOs. They feed on destruction and instability.

_I must smell delicious. _

They travel in a pack, fanning out as they approach with one leader at the head, a wedge of rushing legs and awful noises and a bad, rotten data smell. The leading bug reaches me and rears up, four or five times my size, looming over my head.

It squeals, a piercing, ringing, nasty scream, as I drive the staff through its underside, legs curling underneath it as it falls on the ground, heavy and reeking.

_19 to go._

I hurtle my disc at another while severing head from body from a third. They all howl and scream and grumble as they fall, legs kicking frantically, twitching as they die. The mandibles on the severed head, which roles to my feet, are still opening and closing erratically.

I kick the head away with the same motion I use to recapture my disc, and it knocks another bug's knee, sending it to the ground.

The others close in around me.

_Get out of my city._

One strikes at my shoulder, sending a sharp foot through armor all the way to skin, and through that to pixels underneath. Leaking data from my arm, I am knocked to the ground.

Staff held above me by my good arm, I wait for them to descend.

* * *

Tron

* * *

With the first sweep, Greshim and Mav take out most of the bugs on the perimeter. At the epicenter, the rogue flips from his back to his feet, sawing another bugs legs out from under it with his disc as he does. I drop to the ground just outside the circle of remaining bugs, all but two of which are so distracted by his presence that they don't even turn to look.

The rogue is favoring melee weapons.

Surrounded by ravenous creatures several times his size which are apparently intent on him and him alone . . . he has chosen melee.

_That glitchy, bit-brained, overdramatic little—_

My thought is cut short by a near miss as one of the gridbugs rears up over my head, the pointed ends of its legs driving down towards where I am standing. I hurtle a disc through its underside, duck, and roll away from it as it collapses in a heap. It makes a sort of squealing, shrieking noise as it dies.

Greshim and Mav make another pass overhead, firing the guns of their jets, narrowing the field to nine of the creatures, one of which is dragging itself about with two missing legs, making the most horrible noise I have ever heard. The rogue glances at it, and takes off across the limited open space they left when they encircled him, towards the injured gridbug.

He runs in the strangest way.

He's fast, incredibly fast, and light on his feet. He runs low to the ground, pitched forward, rendering the motion at once elegant and strange, and he pulls up more quickly than it looks like he should be able to. He levels with the bug, and it gnashes its jaws at him and quakes on its remaining legs, snapping at his ankles as he _leaps into the air and uses it as a springboard. _He flips in the air above it, landing on its back and then jumping again in the next nanosecond, driving his staff into it as he does.

The bug writhes as he flies over it, clearing the circle they had formed around him. But in dying, it takes his staff with it; snapping it in half, clattering to the ground in a glimmer of broken data, leaving only a short stick in his hand. The remaining blade fizzles, and goes dark.

He hits the ground and whirls around on the balls of his feet to face the bugs again, head held low, body strung tight, ready to spring, ready to kill. He drops the broken staff to the dusty, foggy ground, and draws his second disc, dividing it from the first.

Something about that gesture sends a shiver through my circuits.

It's familiar, so much so that I'd rather not know why.

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

Tron is here.

_Get out._

He is here for me, of course.

I'd rather be eaten.

I glance at him as he narrowly dodges one of the bugs. There is age in his movements that didn't used to be there. I wonder when the body we shared started to feel the ache of dull pixels in its joints, how much power he needs now to sustain that legendary strength.

I wonder how weary his face looks under that mask. If he still has the scars they gave us, the ones I was never allowed to see, but which haunted my memory files as I slept. I knew they were there, knew what they had done, even when I didn't.

I remembered everything they did to me.

I just wasn't allowed to access the files.

In that helmet, he looks like the only reflection I ever knew. It confounds me to think that underneath it there is a face. That it used to be my face. That I _had _ a face all along, before this body gave me a new one.

Another bug interrupts my thoughts, and I drive a disc first through its leg, and then through its head when it collapses. My shoulder hurts, and parts of me are aching from impact. .. but all things considered, this is easy.

_This is FUN._

Two of Tron's cohorts are battling a group of five bugs a little ways away. It's taking them forever.

_. . . Basics._

Overhead, a lightchopper's blades are beating the air as it sweeps in above us, hovers over the scene while its occupants examine the scene below them.

I toss a disc and ignore them, sawing through another bug. Tron, somewhere off to my left, is nearly halved by the jaws of another, and it shrieks when it bites down on his disc instead, losing half its face –such faces that they have—to its own stupidity. I'm glad it failed.

I want to kill Tron _myself._

When the bugs are gone, I'll disappear in this wreckage, and when he comes for me, I'll tear him open from chin to groin and watch the pixels spill out of him as he collapses into smoking, glittering cubes; and I will leave him there in pieces, dead, dead dead on the ground . . .

But I must wait. For now, there is one bug left to deal with.

ISO killing monsters. I can hear their –our—victims screaming in my head. Suddenly I want to destroy it more than I want to destroy Tron. More than I want anything. Rage boils up in my circuits and everything looks red, and I can hear screaming, screaming, screaming . . .

It runs at me, and I brace myself, furious and vindicated, to meet it.

* * *

Tron

* * *

I look up in time to see the rogue turn on one final insect. There is a long gash in its side that seems to mirror a gaping hole –probably inflicted by one of their legs— in his shoulder. He holds that arm negligibly lower than the other, but still carries a disc in both hands, and his arms are flung wide as if to embrace the thing barreling towards him.

He lets it charge him.

He lets it bear down on him and open its jaws to remove his head from its body, and then he suddenly throws both arms forward, _into its mouth_, discs in hand, and splits its head in two. It dies with its jaws still twitching, grasping for his body, and he does not pull his hands away, but lets it collapse over his discs, lets them saw through the top if its head as it crumples to the ground.

And then he freezes, seething, pixels falling from the wound in his shoulder as his chest heaves, caught up in some phenomenon that only exists inside of his own head, his own systems, and I take my chance.

_It's over, program._

That's what I tell myself.

ooo0o0o0o0o0o0o0ooo

In the brief moment in which the rogue's own thoughts have transfixed him, I approach him silently, disc drawn, pressing it against the back of his neck as I draw up behind him. I can feel fury coming off of him in waves, and the air where he is standing now smells like decaying power-sludge; courtesy of the dead gridbug on the ground at his feet.

I can tell, I can feel, that he re-emerges from his infuriated reverie the instant my disc touches him, and it makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck even as I try to take control:

"To your knees, program. You're under arrest."

His response is slow and chilling. He turns his head unhurriedly to look at me over his shoulder, and says two words in the most horrifying voice that I have ever heard.

The voice is _mine._

There is a biting undercurrent in his tone that is alien to me, dark and bitter and merciless, but it's _my voice._

_ERROR—PROCESSING—_

_IDENTIFYING AUDIO/VISUAL I/O- circuitry (color: dark orange)(pattern: minimal, geometric),age (probable age) ERROR, gender (male) programming (unknown error)-_

_IDENTIFICATION (rogue program) PROCESSING—_

I know who he is before my systems do. Somewhere deep in my code, in the darkest recesses of my programming where I never dare to look, I've known from the start.

There was a blackout in Argon.

_By the sea._

_ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERR—_

_. . ._

_**Rinzler.**_

The rogue program is Rinzler.

I don't understand this. I don't understand how he's alive, just that he is. And it _is _him. I know it deep, deep in my code. I know_ him_. I don't have to see his face through the helmet. I know. It is impossible, but it's him. I know it's him.

I also know what he'll do next.

And yet, I can't move to prevent him. I'm frozen. Absolutely and completely frozen, every system glitching, lines of neat code rendered into useless static that doesn't mean anything, completely and utterly stunned. I can't move, can't think. I just stand there as he whirls out from under my disc to face me, draws his own weapon, and brings it down over my head.

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

I'd forgotten that Tron could be so subtle. I'm surrounded before I have the chance to run, his minions ahead of me to either side, him behind me, having taken advantage of the moment in which I faltered, when the gore of the bug at my feet transfixed me. For a few nanoseconds, I was consumed by the sight of it. By my victory over it. By vindication.

By the broken fragments of a memory, or a prediction . . .

And now Tron is here.

I can feel the crackle of his circuits, am nauseated by the proximity of such a familiar frequency coming from outside of me. It seems wrong, like we're two signals trying to share the same wavelength. I can sense my own my _former _body behind me, so acute I can almost imagine the _his _disc feels in _our _hand, can almost feel the ground under two sets of feet, feel the accelerated cycling of two bodies, not one, me and not me all at once.

Discomfort bubbles up from deep in my code. Then it turns immediately to an irrational, insatiable rage that takes up where my hate for the gridbugs left off. It tastes like burnt circuits and power sludge on my tongue.

He speaks. It's not a familiar voice. After all, _I_ was never allowed to use it.

"On your knees, program," he says, pressing the white-hot blade of his disc against the back of my neck, "you're under arrest."

_. . . No._

I can feel _his _energy, so rudimentary and yet so disconcertingly like my own, in the blade of the disc. It sends a shiver through my circuits, a bolt of electricity down my back all the way to my feet. I have never been so uncomfortable. So angry. So disconcerted.

_And I thought I hated him before._

Slowly, I turn to look at the program whose body I once owned, whose code I shared, whose systems rejected me and left me as nothing, nothing in the still water. He is wearing a helmet as opaque as mine, but I know where to look to meet his eyes.

That was my face once, too, even if I was never allowed to take my helmet off to look at it.

I don't have to see his expression to know what it is.

He's appalled. He's disgusted. I am the monster than haunts his memories, his uglier reflection, and he looks at me _with my eyes _that _he took from me, _and has the audacity to _hate what he sees _almost as much as I hate what I see. Looking at him feels like a painful shock or a bitter taste or a shallow wound and I can't stop myself: I don't mean to waste my first words on him, but all at once, I am speaking, lashing out and throwing his own voice back at him just for spite.

"Make me."

Because I've never used my voice before, and the words are slow in coming, crawling from my throat, slow, like dying. They are halting words, and the voice is rougher, lower than I would have expected.

_Like his voice. _

His voice, but with a biting undercurrent to the words which I suspect is natural to me. There is a cutting edge to my tone, a heaviness he lacks that has its origins in cycle after cycle of loneliness oppression and pain.

. . . It sounds like the inside of my head.

And inside of my head, I am still furious. Reeling, twisting on the balls of my feet, I spin out from under Tron's disc. Turning to face him, I can see that I have stunned him.

He knows.

_. . ._

_Processing—_

_Processing—_

. . . I think I'll kill him now.

* * *

**_Author's note: _**Hey guys! So, I realize that the POV changes pretty frequently in this chapter. Unless you really like that, I'm going to try and keep the switching to the minimum as the story goes on... this is just what worked for THIS chapter especially. Any feedback you have on that, or ANYTHING else, is welcome as always!

Also, I modeled my gridbugs off of Betrayal, but since I don't have the comic in front of me right now, please forgive me any errors on the detail work. I did my best with the images I had, and hopefully, that was enough. If not though, by all, means critique away of you want to. XD

That said, my thanks to Cyberbutterfly for beta-ing, and to all of you, as always, for reading!

-End of line.


	7. Confrontation

Rinzler

* * *

He ducks at the last second.

Or maybe he just trips.

Diving or falling or twisting away, he comes to rest just to my left, favoring my injured arm, and his disc, still hot from battling the gridbugs, rezzes to life in his hand. He jabs it at at me, aggressive and sudden and sloppy.

I side kick him in the stomach.

He reels backwards, and I am on him before he can right himself, turning hand over foot after him, straightening again only when I am so close that I can feel the fizzle of his circuits.

What I sense in him at this range surprises me. I had expected him to be angry, furious at finding me alive. Appalled, maybe. But he's not. Not below the surface, not deep down in his code where he harbors his deepest thoughts and ugliest memories. Where I used to hide him.

Deep down, he's afraid.

_Good._

I fling my own disc at his helmet-hidden face, and he ducks again as he deflects it, only narrowly missing my other disc as I thrust it towards his chest.

_You should be._

I know his style too well. But he also knows mine. It's one of the few things that hasn't changed, and fighting him is a game of prediction, of trying to outwit each other when we each know what the other will do. It's unspeakably frustrating, and alarmingly tiring. My left shoulder is aching, pain shooting from the through-and-through puncture the gridbug gave me all the way into my fingers.

I hide my pain as well as he does, and in my own way. I bear it with silence.

_I wonder if he knows . . ._

I wonder why it matters.

The fight goes on. I jump, spin, almost land on him. He dives aside and hurtles a disc at me as I return to the ground. I duck in the air to avoid it, and I miss my landing . . . but I kick his legs out from under him when I hit the ground, taking him with me. He lands a few feet away on his back, with a solid thud.

Then he kicks me in the head.

_You fight like a user, old program._

The thought lags in my head, vision spinning from the impact, tiny explosions clouding my vision, but I ignore it. He's strong. Solid. He puts an excess of force into every move he makes towards me, sacrificing precision for blind, secretly terrified rage.

I need to get off the ground.

I'll have the advantage in the air, where I can turn and twist and move freely, slicing, jabbing, I'll take him apart . . .

Throwing my legs in the air, I flip back to my feet. But before I can take a step closer, before I can plant a foot on his chest, before I can drive him down into the dirt and dust and ruin and fog that coats the ground and put a disc through his neck, he rolls, and leaps to his own feet.

He's slower than I am, but faster than I remember.

The first punch he throws lands on my injured shoulder. The feeling goes out of my arm. Then he kicks me, once, twice, and then bombards me with another blow with something –an elbow or the heel of his hand— to the side of my head. The helmet helps, but not enough.

I see sparks.

Users, I hate him . . .

_I'm going to kill you, Tron._

Pain fuels fury.

_You slow, basic, inept, ancient . . ._

I spin on my heel as I reel away from him, and hurtle myself towards him. It's not something he expects from me, my swelling rage making me as stupid and reckless as he is. But he needs both discs to deflect mine as plow through him. I hand on my feet, turning in the air. He falls to the ground.

_Pathetic._

Then something slices through my ankle, and down I go.

* * *

Tron

* * *

I'd forgotten how much he likes to play with people before he kills them. He should have had me with the second or third blow, but he enjoys the experience of fighting. He likes throwing himself around in the air and cutting programs down bit by bit. He enjoys it too much to let it end quickly. Fighting him is like fighting a… a "nightmare". A bad memory.

I can't read his expression through his helmet as he falls, his ankle giving way beneath him, but the brightness in his circuits, the way he directs his fall to land nearly on top of me . . . he's as angry as he's always been. Maybe worse.

_But how is he alive?_

. . . On second thought, I don't care. I don't intend on leaving him that way long enough for it to matter. I'm going to cut him down, crush the pixels, and leave them in a heap for any remaining gridbugs to swallow. He's furious enough now that he's getting stupid, and I stand more than a fighting chance of killing him here and now. The fact that I was able to lunge at him from the ground and nearly cut his foot off of his leg without him stopping me is evidence of that.

We're both on the ground, now, me on my back and him on his stomach, practically on top of me and holding himself up as much as he can on one arm and his good ankle as he lunges for my side with one of his discs. I roll my legs up by my stomach, and kick him as hard as I can with both feet.

He tumbles away from me, leaking pixels from his ankle and shoulder, and when he comes to rest he jerks his head up and snarls at me. It isn't his old, broken growl, but it's close.

I dive for him.

Touching him is repulsive, his circuits seeming to resonate with mine in a way that no circuit should, but as I tackle him, I manage to dislodge one of his discs by doing so- and it's worth it. He fights back, tries to drive the other disc through my neck from behind, throwing his arms around my shoulders and kicking my stomach from underneath me in an effort to either throw me off of damage me, apparently immune to the pain in his ankle. I drive an elbow into the wound on his shoulder.

He stiffens.

It's eerie, how silent he is. He throws his head back and rolls –taking both of us with him—to relive he pressure, but he doesn't scream. He doesn't even groan. The circuits in his arm flicker, and his hand goes limp around his remaining disc, but he doesn't make a sound.

Instead, he rolls again.

We tumble through the dirt, each desperately stabbing at the other, and he knocks one of my discs away, too.

But he's not used to such dirty fighting. Users, I'm not sure he's used to fighting at all. What he's running around in is a new body, a more compact, lither form and not an exact replica of me; and as well as he moves it it's injured and new and he's probably struggling with it more than he's willing to admit even to himself.

He's not at his worst, yet.

I'm not going to let him live to get there.

Driving a hand through the hole in his shoulder, I pin him between my knees, and lift my remaining disc over my head.

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

"Get out of my system."

Tron's voice is dark, twisted almost beyond recognition. I could almost laugh, even as he straddles me, pinning me on my back on the cold ground with his disc raised over his head.

_Look at yourself, Tron._

It's almost sad, I don't know which is winning: his fear of me or his hatred of himself. Whichever it is, he thinks he's going to kill me now.

But that isn't going to happen. If I have to punch a hole in him with my bare hand, I am not dying. Not yet.

_Not for you._

I manage to grab him around his throat with my good hand. I squeeze, dig into him until I can feel pixels shattering, cutting off the cycling of air to his breakable old basic body. I also kick a knee into his back for good measure. Something cracks, and a shudder runs through his circuits. I like the sound he makes when he's in pain.

I'd like to hear it again.

Looming over me, but slightly doubled over now, his helmet collapses. I'll never forget his face in this moment so long as I live.

He looks tired. Tired and angry and terrified, fear hiding behind a mask of rage so twisted, so warped he doesn't look real, blue eyes flashing, hair a mess. The scar on his face is gone, but the ones inside him are tearing him apart—ripping, shredding, breaking and crushing him from the inside, hollowing him out to nothing but a few pixels and a wire-frame. A projection. A shadow. He's already lost.

He brings down his disc.

* * *

Tron

* * *

He moves so quickly. Somehow, he gets a hand around my throat, lifting one leg to knee me squarely in the back with more force than any normal program should possibly be able to inflict. It's surprisingly painful, in addition to the fact that he's cutting off my ability to breathe.

_Come on Tron, do it._

There's a small part of me that wants to know what he looks like under that helmet. On the other hand, however, most of me wants to put a disc through his face. I throw my arm down, so close to getting rid of him, forever this time, and then a black blur with red hair dives headlong into my body.

Radi and I tumble away from Rinzler, coming to a stop in a heap amidst swirling dust and fog a little ways away. Lifting me head, I can see Rinzler trying to rise before Paige rushes in and traps him with a light cable. She has him contained before I can even throw Radi off and send a disc at him.

I cannot even begin to fathom what is happening anymore.

I jump to my feet, and drag Radi with me, screaming at her without realizing at first that I've even opened my mouth.

"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, PROGRAM?"

She steps closer to me, my hand still locked around her wrist, far tighter than it ought to be. The next thing I know, she's so close I can feel her breath on my face.

"You can't kill him," she snarls. I'm actually taken aback. This is the most furious I have ever seen her, but it's not even anger, so much as desperation, that I can see in her eyes.

"Look," she says, and she shakes my hand away from her wrist to grab me by the shoulder, forcing my body around to look at Rinzler where he is tied up on the ground. He doesn't have to speak for me to know that he is fuming.

Paige, with a nod from Radi, grabs him and yanks him to a sitting position, shoving him so that his left arm is facing us. It take me a moment to see what Radi sees, and when I do, I feel for a moment as if I might black out and collapse into standby right there in the ruins of Arjia.

Pulsing white against one of the red bands of circuitry that encircles his arm, is an ISO emblem.


	8. Reveal

Tron

* * *

It takes me a moment to understand what I'm seeing.

_That's not possible . . ._

The ISOs are dead. The ISOs are dead and Rinzler killed the last of them himself. Besides, he's a function of _me, _how could he possibly manifest on his own? There wasn't enough code there to make a whole program—all I lost were some memory files and the emotional context that went with them. I'm 97-98% whole. He was not that autonomous.

I refuse to believe he was ever that autonomous. He was a corruption, not a program. A shell full of Clu's lies, that's it. He should look like nothing but the code for an orange circuit mask and some enforcement upgrades without me.

But here he is.

_-Error-_

An ISO.

_-Processing-_

Complete with an emblem. I don't even understand why I didn't see that before.

As if she can read my thoughts, Radi explains.

"It showed through when you . . . _hit _his arm again," she says gruffly.

Meanwhile, Greshim and Mav rush in, holding Rinzler in silence while Paige replaces the lightcable with cuffs, pinning his hands behind his back. She landed the chopper nearby at some point in the course of our fight, and the rotors are spinning lazily, blowing dust in our faces and fog around our ankles as we stand here, Radi and I a short distance away from . . . _him . . ._ and his captors.

I stare at his arm. I don't know what my face looks like, but my systems are screaming. I can't process this, largely because I don't want to.

Rinzler follows my gaze, ducking his head towards his left side, looking at the glowing emblem and the injury in the shoulder above it. I still can't see his face (which is fine by me) but I can tell that he is putting together the sequence of events more quickly than I am; head snapping back up in the next instant to stare at me with some unimaginable expression that I'm glad I don't have to look at.

_Processing—_

It bothers me that he processes with so much more expediency than I do.

_Processing—_

_Come on, Tron. Put it together._

_Processing—_

_How slow are you getting, old program? The emblem showed up after-_

Ah.

I see.

I went for his shoulder to keep him down (and maybe, just maybe to hurt him, to see if he was real) and the trauma caused a glitch in the circuit mask he must have been using to hide it.

It.

An **ISO emblem.**

On _**Rinzler.**_

_ERROR._

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

This is not how this was supposed to work.

_Let. Me. GO._

I was pulled here, driven here for a reason, and it was not to waste my precious time on this hapless bunch of would be enforcers and their too-stunned-to-function leader.

_Stop looking at me like that._

Tron is the only one who understands who he is seeing, and he stares accordingly, glaring. The others stare too, but at the symbol on my arm and the color of my circuits and all the physical attributes which they're putting together bit by minuscule bit. Not at me.

Tron is the only one asking who, not what.

The others see only an object, a myth brought to life to ogle at. To judge by their standards, by the laws they can barely uphold, to sentence as they please or study like a bit of broken data under 100% magnification.

_They_ are still staring. Tron now tries not to look.

_You thought you were rid of me, didn't you?_

Of course he did. He thinks he's always supposed to win. That the _users _are with him.

Funny how well that mentality worked out for him the last time I was born.

I feel like gloating. Like looking him in the eye and injuring him with my presence, like hurling words at his feet just to spite him. But I don't. I _can_ speak now, but under their watching fearful-curious-furious eyes, I don't want to. I don't want to say a word.

Besides, Tron has been in my head anyway.

He should know exactly what I'm thinking.

_You were wrong._

_I'm back…_

I'm better.

_I'm not going anywhere._

_I'm not going anywhere and nei—_

I catch my own thought, pin it down and hold it where I can see it, where I can tear a seam down the middle and understand what just came into my mind, came without me asking for it. Five words, like a warning from the sea, like a whisper from Arjia.

_. . . And neither are the others._

* * *

Yori

* * *

Tron took off in such a rush, and took so many of our best with him, that I feel a little as if someone has just pulled the floor out from under me and left me to put it back myself. Tron gets . . . _infatuated _with things sometimes. Ideas settle in his head and he pursues them at all costs until he either sees them through to completion or is given no choice but to let it go or see someone hurt. This rogue is going to be one of those things. I can feel it.

And that worries me more than I can stand to admit. I have this feeling . . . it's not bad, exactly, but ominous. Like something is coming that we are not prepared for, like nothing is a coincidence anymore, like—

_Alert—_

A warning siren rings out from above my control panel, which I have been leaning on as I've pondered Tron's latest obsession. When I turn to look, between the red, flashing words on every screen reading _ARGON: INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE, _I can see the details of what's happened.

_WARNING:POWER FAILURE—WARNING: POWER FAILURE—WARNING:P—_

_. . . No coincidences._

_ERROR: FAILURE RECTIFIED—ARGON: INFRASTRUCTURE: ALL SYSTEMS ONLINE-_

Then, in an instant, as if the users themselves have reached in to fix it, the warning suddenly disappears, and all systems come back online in the fastest turnaround of a failure –let alone the largest power failure—that I have ever seen.

Something is coming. I wish I knew what.

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

Something happened.

Something has _just happened. _It came in with the words; a ripple in the system. I can feel the waves washing through me, over me, around me.

For a moment, I swear I can taste the sea . . .

_I understand now._

Being born takes time. The first ripples come early, we emerge later. I am suddenly certain that is what I am feeling, here in the ruins we're going to inherit, the city which brought me all the way here just to tell me that it was going to be mine.

_And to put Tron and I in the same place . . ._

_ERROR._

No, I refuse to believe that. Not at this time.

But a city . . . a city is meant to house programs. To be lived in and worked in and felt in and loved in and hated in and died in. And they are coming. That is the message. That was the shudder in the air.

The ISOs are coming, and we will need a home. In this desolate ruin, where there is no one alive left to displace, where no one claims ownership and no one will, we can have one.

This is not _my _city. It's ours. And we will need it soon.

Very, very slowly, we are coming, and our—our leader_- _ is being born.

This time when I look at Tron, I really do have to laugh.

* * *

Tron

* * *

I have a few choice words for how I feel about the noise that escapes him the next time that impenetrable helmet tips up, indicating that he's looking at me. None of them are nice.

_Is that supposed to be a laugh?_

He stands out like a beacon in this place. It's all gray dust, black outland rock, shattered silver ruins, hazy white light that refracts off of everything to give the place a faint bluish hue, ambient light hovering just above the swirling white mist on the ground. He kneels, cuffed, at green-clad Paige's feet; Greshim's faded gray circuits and Mav's white circuit mask framing him while they hold him down, each with their hands clenched around his shoulder. And then there's Rinzler, a bright red gash in the middle of all of it . . . laughing.

Greshim's expression, as usual, is flat to the point of being dull. After so many years of being a sentry, he gives away nothing. Paige looks like she's afraid to touch him, and yet tempted to kick him in the back at the same time. Mav's expression is unreadable, but I can't help but notice that he's being gentler than I would be with the ISO's injured shoulder. He glances at me, a sideways look that only lasts a nano before it's gone, but which is enough to give me the distinct impression that if anyone here besides me understands _who _we are dealing with, it's him.

Maybe that's why, when Rinzler suddenly throws his shoulder into Greshim's groin, shoving the considerably bulkier (and now very much in pain) program aside as if it's nothing and leaping to his feet, Mav doesn't hesitate. Before Rinzler can even finish the kick he was aiming at him, he pulls his baton and drives it into his side. There is a flash of electricity, and Rinzler crumples to the ground. Radi screams, and bolts to where Rinzler lies.

Mav stands by as if nothing has happened, replacing his baton. Paige is fuming –her usual reaction to feeling disconcerted— and Greshim is doubled over off to the side. When Radi arrives beside them she looks ready to cut Mav clean-through, but that's before she realizes that it was just a shock device, not a light blade. Rinzler is unconscious, not dead.

They have all frozen to look at him.

I jog up to where they are standing, and arrive beside them just in time for Radi to look down and see what everyone else sees.

His helmet collapsed when he went down, exposing his face. There is a moment of tense silence.

Then they all turn to me.

Paige is the first to try and speak, rounding on me with furious intensity in her expression, hair falling farther into her eye as she whips her head around. But Radi cuts her off, her voice so hollow and so scathing it's almost as unsettling to listen to as Rinzler's face is to look at; the words meticulously separated, like verbal stabs.

"What. Did. You. _Do."_

oo0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0oo

"I had _nothing_ to do with this," I hiss, turning on the woman beside me with a toxic tone that I have rarely heard from myself, and which has never boded well.

_Get it together, Tron._

_. . . Yeah, right._

Radi scowls back at me, arms crossed over her chest, feet planted shoulder width apart, completely un-phased by my tone. Maybe she doesn't understand what that means . . . that the last time I sounded like that was the last time I was able to speak.

Or maybe, her apparent obsession with ISOs considered, she just doesn't care.

"You have no idea who this is." I practically spit the words at her. Her eyes –which are unusual for a program, almost purple in color—narrow in response.

Paige is the next to speak. She throws her hip out and props her hand on it, leaning over Rinzler's unconscious body to look me in the eye from under her dark hair, feisty and fearsome all at once.

"Then why don't you tell us?" She says, glowering. There is something like fear in her brown eyes, though, confusion and alarm clouding her irritation. It's really not surprising that she and Radi are friends . . . they handle things identically.

I'm trying not to look at the limp figure on the ground. I'm waiting . . . hoping that one of them will figure it out, that they'll spare me from having to say that name out loud, from having to admit that what I'm seeing is real.

_It can't be…._

Seeing his face makes it worse.

_Why couldn't you just die?_

Paige breaks my reverie.

"**Well?"**

I look up at her, down at Rinzler, and back to the group. My voice is suddenly gone. I couldn't answer her if I tried.

_I couldn't speak if I tried. . ._

Panic suddenly rises up in me, clawing its way up my throat, squeezing it shut from the inside. I can't move. I can't speak, I can't even change my expression from the mask of anger I'm sure I'm wearing.

I can't look at anything but him, there on the ground, bent almost backwards because of how tightly Paige cuffed his hands behind his back, one leg bent, the other straightened, expression still and raging all at once.

He's so . . . _pale. _Well, no,not even pale so much as _clean; _his complexion brighter than a basic's, still new and untarnished under his helmet. Brand new skin and hair and features and circuits.

There are four lines of circuitry on his face.

One symmetrical pair shoots from just below each temple, slashing across the sides of his face, coming to a stop on the most prominent part of his cheekbones, below his eyes. The next pair sits above the first, starting from the corners of his eyes and running back to the exact center of his temples. The last, a free standing line of orange-touched red light, races from the bridge of his nose up to his hairline, where it disappears beneath a mess of dark, dark hair. Unlike circuits on a gridsuit, circuits on the skin (which some call light lines to differentiate them from what we basics have) seem to glow from underneath, a slightly visible pulse of energy brightening and darkening them in subtle, rhythmic repetitions that are only noticeable from up close.

If there was any doubt about what type of program he is, the circuits dispel that. Only ISOs have light lines, and after so long in an ISO-free grid, the fine lines of light are unsettling and unfamiliar, especially in that pattern. There is nothing smooth, nothing gentle in the pattern. They look like red slashes across his face, and they mirror the jagged, semi-symmetrical lines of circuitry on his body. I'm not sure which is more unnerving, the circuits themselves . . . or the face beneath them.

He looks like me, but he doesn't. His nose is the same, the shape of his eyes and the way his brows rest over them is like mine, but his jaw is harder, his cheeks sharp and prominent, and his face is thinner and his forehead not so high. He has my features, but refined. Cut down and detailed to match his _slightly _smaller, quicker frame, sharpened and hardened and exaggerated, me but nothing like me all at once.

No wonder the others are staring.

He looks like what he is: He looks like me with every scrap of joy torn out, and every shred of violence balled up in his center. Me as an enforcer. As a weapon. If I'm a staff, he's a lightblade.

I am still frozen, eyes following the angles of his face, the pattern of the circuits on his chest. Around his collar there is a band of circuitry that runs around his neck and then plunges diagonally across his chest, stopping above a single square in the exact center, and then continuing on beyond it at a new angle, like a broken sash. A circular band of red light encircles each of his arms as well, and his emblem stands out in white against one of them. He looks _exactly _likewhat he is . . .

The others are still waiting for me to explain, Radi still angry, Paige still unnerved, Greshim's expression as flat and dull as ever beneath the halo of his black and blond hair, and I still can't answer them.

But then Mav looks at me, manages to break through my paralysis to make eye contact. He meets my gaze, and nods once.

"I know who this is," he says.

The others look up, myself included, to hear him out. He speaks decisively, and his tone is as strict as a command.

"This is Rinzler."

* * *

_Author's note: _Thank you to Pixaneth and ScribeOfRED for helping me edit this, to all of you for reading, and special thanks to those of you have been reviewing. Your feedback really helps!

End of line.


	9. Tampering

_**VERY IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE**_**: **In my headcanon, at some point during Clu's rule he encountered Yori and –as a way to torture whatever was left of Tron in Rinzler—repurposed her into a zombie-worker-drone, and proceeded to work her down "to the bone," so to speak. In a moment of what MAY have been Tron peeking through, or (as I like to think of it) MAY have been something else, Rinzler corners her and manages to snap her out of her zombie-state so that she can escape in one piece . . . more or less saving her life, or at least her life as she know it. Normally I try and make my stories as stand-alone as possible, but that's a really important element of my personal headcanon that I reeeaaaalllly wanted to have factor into this fic, so thank you in advance for bearing with me, as it will be mentioned in passing in this chapter.

Oh, and if you're interested, you can read a version of this event in "Survivor's Tale" chapter 25 (Yori's POV), OR in my one-shot "Perfect" (Basic!Rinzler's POV).

-Ridyr

oo0o0o0o0o0o0oo

* * *

Rinzler

* * *

I wake in a stupor. My left shoulder feels like it's been plugged full of something sticky and thick. In the place of pain is a dull tingling.

Slowly moving my head, rolling it across the floor since I am apparently on my back, I can see that it has been repaired, but judging by the ache, whoever patched the damage had to prod at it awhile to do so.

Probably couldn't figure out my code.

Hmph.

_Basics._

I don't mind the pain, though. I'm used to it.

It's a recurring theme in most of my own basic-memories. I spent most of my life before this one in some form of agony or another.

I'm good at pain.

Which is probably why I am more irritated with the fact that, although there is no damage to my right side that I can discern by looking at it, it's tender. Probably courtesy of the shock that the program with the poorly masked circuits gave me. Daring of him, really. That much charge would have killed a basic, which is telling. The only programs who ever had that kind of crowd control equipment, those capabilities, were elite guards; guards that, for one reason or another, needed to kill quietly.

_Quite the group you have here, Tron . . . Killers and misfits._

They're all almost as damaged as he is, albeit less bitter.

Looking around, I can see that I have been dropped unceremoniously onto the floor of their white-circuited light chopper.

_How dare you . . ._

My vision is still hazy, and the lights around me blur into incomprehensible smudges, but the programs themselves are clear enough, looming above me. The one with the circuit mask and questionable history is standing almost on top of me, along with the redheaded female with the near-black circuits and oddly colored eyes. The big, dull program with the faded, gray-ish looking circuits is missing, probably gone on ahead with a jet.

At the controls stands the other female, the full-lipped brunette, with Tron beside her. I recognize her from somewhere, a shadow of one of his memories that I can't quite make out because it predates me, one of the old memories he never really gave me but was never strong enough to take away.

I seem to remember her in orange.

Above me, the redhead's eyes flash, and she turns to address her leader.

"Tron."

The redhead with the black circuits steps away from where I lie and towards him as she speaks. Her voice sounds distorted somehow, too clear but too distant, fizzling and piercing all at once.

_What did you people do to me . . ._

Rolling my head around to look, I can see Tron's reaction. He looks up sharply.

_Angry._

His helmet is back on.

_Hiding . . ._

"He's coming to."

"Put him out again" is his gruff response.

Lifting my head off the floor, I glare at him. The gesture is more difficult that it should be. I feel tired, drained. New bodies are so sensitive . . . and I feel wrong, somehow. Tampered with.

But that can't be right. Tron is good, but he's not technical. He doesn't know his way around a disc well enough to reconfigure someone's code, let alone code as beautifully complex as ours.

But the fact remains: I'm too far gone. From whatever he made them do.

_Don't you . . . dare . . . shock me again . . .Or are you going to kill me while I'm down? _

_. . . Coward._

The word echoes in my head, and I have to grit my teeth, bite down with a weakened jaw, to keep from visibly grimacing. My head is . . . nothing I'm seeing will stay still. Tron goes in and out of focus, closer, farther, closer, a shadow then a beacon of minimal white on so much black, reduced to a helmet and a bleary four-squared emblem . . .

All at once, I feel sick. Like all the power I've ingested wants to seep back out of me, short all of my circuits and spill on the floor.

_Why am I so tired . . ._

If he shocks me again, I think he'll ruin me. Not that Tron won't love that. To ruin, instead of being ruined.

The male program, who looks massive from down here on the floor, however, replies on _my_ behalf.

"He may be awake," he says, his tone short and biting, "but he's not going anywhere, believe me. Another shock would be a bad idea."

_You don't say._

Tron zeros in on him, and I can tell by the tense posture of his shoulders that he is considering getting upset with the younger program, but then he changes his mind. He doesn't fight him, doesn't order him to break me while he has an audience.

But he doesn't relax, either.

"Fine," he replies, "just keep him down. And if he gets his helmet back up . . . break it."

_. . . ._

Why he would order this I have no idea, but there is something in the sentiment which leaves me with a distinct clenching, sinking feeling. It makes my head spin faster, my vision blur to blindness.

I let my head fall back to the floor. It hits too hard, heavier, somehow, than I thought it was. A sharp pulse of pain turns my vision white as it meets the grate-like, perforated floor. I can almost feel the pattern of it biting its way into my scalp, and I think I smell a spark. A hot, electric shiver runs from the point of impact to the base of my neck, and all the way to my forehead, following the circuit there.

I never bothered to find out how far back that circuit goes.

_I should have noticed that . . ._

But I didn't. They know more about what I look like, about my new body, than I do. I never bothered to really look. Not like I should have. I've been so busy feeling and seeing and smelling and _hating that broken old hunk of root code _whose cohorts are so _preoccupied with staring at me._ A specimen instead of a program.

Staring when I can't hide . . .

Even as Tron keeps his face beneath a shield of black. He used to favor a transparent helmet. Not anymore.

_Couldn't give it up, could you . . . Too used . . . to not having a face . . ._

I'd laugh at him if I weren't so sure the effort would shut me down again.

Meanwhile the chopper banks beneath me, and city lights in blue and green and white are visible through its open sides. I stare out at them as the fly by, a haze of cool color so much gentler on my increasing nausea than trying to think, than looking back at too many faces looking down on me, searching my expression, the eyes I have never bothered to see.

I recognize the streets below. I know these broken buildings, these recently repaved intersections and hazy streetlights. Even as that awful feeling, that sense of upheaval, that I'm going to spill out of myself, continues, I can sense our directionality, track where we are heading.

He's taking me to the administrative building.

_Taking me home, are you?_

A large, mostly rectangular, tiered structure topped with an impressive spire, comes into view through the front windshield. I remember it well.

It was once Clu's headquarters.

My home, my prison.

_Delightful._

I'm not sure there is any location in this system that I hate more.

And Tron knows it.

oo0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0oo

Everything spirals into darkness for a moment when they pick me up again. The redhead and the male program hold me, digging their fingers into my arms as they lift me. My hands are still behind my back.

I see a blur of sparks and circuits, and my legs sag beneath me. My brand new legs . . .

_Paige, did you do something when you fixed his shoulder?_

_Did **I **do something? You're the one who zapped him, Mav._

Their voices sound for a moment like they're coming from inside of my head, and I can't tell if I'm on-line or off.

But then, all at once, I am conscious again. I pull my legs up beneath me, thrash once, but it's a gesture more than it is a genuine effort. The world around me still looks hazy, and I am more tired than I have yet been in this body. I couldn't get away from them if I tried.

The redhead snaps at the others from beside me, ignoring my pathetic efforts to respond to their empty words:

"He's probably power drained, bit-brains. Just because it's been nine of ten hundred cycles since you were a new program doesn't mean the rules have changed."

Tron's voice, suddenly exasperated, chastises her from somewhere behind me as they lead me out of the chopper and onto one of the lower rooftops of the tiered admin building.

"Radi."

_Mav, Paige, Radi. . . _

I work on memorizing their names to keep myself conscious. The redh—_Radi _isn't wrong. I am low. Lower than I should be, even considering everything I've gotten myself into since crawling onto the shoreline.

Holding my head up is an effort.

Then again, I'd have gotten derezzed already for resisting if I felt like myself. Maybe it's a blessing.

They lead me through a doorway and down a long, sloping hallway. Soft green light. White tiles of smooth data on the floor. Calm colors. Gentle colors.

It's not the building I remember at all.

To get me . . . wherever it is they are taking me, we pass through a room which houses enough control panels for a staff of twenty admin and filing programs. It is being used by one. One very familiar, unsettlingly appealing, female.

She holds her head very high, her chin out. Like she is trying to open up her neck, to make some space. To elevate herself from that weight in her chest.

Someone should tell her she can't.

How do you lessen a weight like that? Tired, tired program. I know her face from a memory that was never mine. Hair like a halo of light, blond in every direction, choppy bangs. Bright blue eyes, delicate little features that fall and freeze when she sees me.

_Hello Yori._

She grabs onto the edge of her control panel for support, ignoring an urgently flashing message on the screen beside her to stare at me with her lips parted as if her mouth has gone slack, something like horror, something like excitement in her eyes. And shock.

They keep reacting like that.

She's changed since last I saw her. The black gridsuit, the neon-blue circuits of the old system, the recurring theme of triangles their patterns form in the middle of her chest and across her hips . . . those are the same. But not her face. Her face doesn't even look like it belongs to her anymore.

She's gotten pale for a program, the subtle kind of paleness that creeps in over the cycles little by little until eventually there is no color left.

Her eyes, too, are dull. Like she needs an energy boost even though she's probably had six of them already today; and that pretty halo of hair has lost some of its shine since I last saw her. Her expression, has changed too, the way her persistence drains out of it with so little resistance . . . it's not her. Even her stubbornness is giving up, the fight in her slowly surrendering to stress and hopelessness, confusion and disorganization that she can't fight, can't rebel against because it's everywhere. Everywhere, and now I'm here to make it worse.

_What happened to you, program?_

I can sense it from here. There is tiredness in her. Perpetual, excessive tiredness, the kind that drags you down like a weight into liquid, pulling, pulling until you sink to nothing and are crushed in the dark under the weight of it.

Tiredness that will turn to desperation if she is not watchful. If he isn't.

Tron can't bring himself to look at her.

Not with me here.

_You'll lose her, doing that._

He doesn't see the way the confidence in her eyes falters, the barely visible shiver in her too-bright circuits. Doesn't catch her eye when she looks to him for guidance, leaves her hanging on a ledge alone when she looks to him for the explanation she doesn't need.

_Clever program—_

She glances at me hesitantly, as if she knows I'm thinking about her.

_You probably knew all along._

Who else in this rabble would have the good sense to monitor infrastructure, who else's programming would be sufficient? She must have noticed the sea.

_Of course you did._

Why Tron didn't know better, then, I don't know . . .

_Processing—_

_. . . You didn't tell him._

_Why wouldn't you tell him . . .?_

She meets my eyes, makes herself see me, really see me, move past the haze of fear and alarm and hesitation. Fixes me with her stare.

"How?" she says, and though everyone looks to Tron to answer her, she is looking at me. At first it is such an obvious question, but then she stutters, adds one more word, asks one more thing.

"Why?"

My head jerks up, and I hold her eyes just as she holds mine. I can see that she has alarmed herself with her own question. Not just "how". Not "that's impossible."

_Why aren't you more surprised?_

She asks _why, _asks like it's nothing, like it's not the most essential in my existence. _Why am I here._ There is no directive to tell me why the sea picked me, built up a new being around the little fragmented, corrupted strings of code it washed away from Tron. Why it made me to protect–

_Rinzler._

_Stop it._

Yori returns my stare now with a look that says she knows she's triggered me. I say nothing, but she knows. I get the distinct feeling that somehow, she knows.

_Clever, clever program . . ._

She watches me over Tron's shoulder as he steps out of our rank and file to approach her, never breaking eye contact, never looking away.

Then the rest of them lead me out.

* * *

Yori

* * *

I glance up at the sound of people coming down the hallway, the footsteps oddly shuffling. When they come around the corner, I can see why: Radi and Mav are holding up a clearly debilitated program between them, a program with red circuits. Greshim ran in here a moment ago without a word, bolting for the cell block, and I suppose this is why. Those weird reddish circuits can only belong to our rogue.

_Thank the users, maybe Tron will calm down now . . ._

That thought is squashed immediately when he follows them into the room,ruined by his body language. His helmet is on, and he is looking very pointedly away from me, which both perplexes and frustrates me extremely. Searching for answers, I turn my gaze on the weakened rogue; a program just a little shorter than Tron with a relatively thin, but well-proportioned build and with very shiny, very straight, very dark hair ––almost black but not quite— which he wears at a shaggy, medium length. He looks strong and lightweight, and the way he moves ––even when incapacitated—is unusual. I can't decide if it's too fluid or too quick, or a combination of both. When he turns to look at me his head seems to loll on his shoulders and whip around at the same time, a precision slump.

When I see his face, I have to grab the control panel beside me for support. There are _circuits _there—

_I can't have been right about this. . ._

––_ISO circuits_ on the most ridiculously, preposterously impossible face I have ever seen.

_It can't be._

_IT CAN'T BE._

_It can't it can't it can't. He's gone. Tron said he was gone . . .You said he was GONE!_

If I had been asked to design a face for Rinzler, I could never have come up with anything as perfect as this. He looks like Tron in so many ways, and yet his face is so sharp that in others they look nothing alike at all. Tron's features are really very gentle, all things considered; he has a strong chin but a soft jaw and often looks a little pouty when he's lost in thought, or not gritting his teeth about something. Rinzler lacks that, completely and utterly. If there is an element of softness on him anywhere, I can't see it. His face is a series of hard angles, and his expression is not much gentler. He fixes me with a stare that sends a chill through my circuits, analytical and furiously intense at the same time. His eyes . . . His eyes are _incredible_.

They're bright near the center, an uneven, pale halo around his pupils that radiates outward, getting darker and darker as it goes. Aside from that silver-blue brightness right near the middle, they are a blue so deep that I imagine they'll look black when the light isn't hitting them; like the data in the sea he crawled out of.

_That is such a strange thought . . ._

Too strange. It sends a series of distracting yellow warning lights across my vision, so many different kind of alerts I can't figure out which system it is that's even trying to process this information that's causing the problem. I look to Tron for an answer as he strides on ahead of the group.

But . . . he still doesn't look at me.

I know that he knows that I'm looking at him, but his helmet dips ever so slightly farther in the opposite direction, as if somehow the far wall has gotten more appealing since I took an interest in him. I suddenly feel like shouting at him to look, to tell me if _he _suspected all along, if this option really, truly never occurred to him, if I was the only who, just for a nanosecond, wondered if nightmares could become reality . . . not that I _knew _exactly, but there was a moment, a flight of fancy. . . of course _know_. . .

I can feel hi—_Rinzler__'__s__—_eyes on me, though, and anything stupid, anything bold or assertive I was considering seems somehow inappropriate. Like he's watching both of us, and me especially, from the inside out. I've heard of some ISOs giving basics that impression, but I've never experienced it, and I can't decide if it's because of what he is or who he is that his gaze holds such incredible weight. I can't help it— I glance towards his face.

All at once, the alerts fall silent.

There is one thing that I always pictured in his expression that is lacking, and I don't want to think about what it is. He looks furious, and exhausted, and vengeful and emboldened and disdainful and vulnerable all at once, but there is no _pain _in his eyes. Not like there is in Tron's, when he thinks I'm not looking. He isn't miserable. He isn't defeated. Even captured and debilitated by exhaustion or injury– I can't tell from here which—he looks completely and utterly victorious. He is not in pain_. _And he is **not** mindless.

Not anymore.

He's . . . alive.

Really, truly alive.

A word falls out of my mouth on its own accord before I can stop it, and honestly, I don't even know why I ask it.

"How?"

I _know _how. It's obvious, now that he's being paraded in front of me like this, surrounded by faces that are either eager for my reaction or pointed determinedly at the floor, being dragged around by two of our best while Tron charges ahead as if he can somehow outrun this if he just looks furious enough, if he just hides beneath that helmet a little longer . . . which isn't, obviously, going to help him at all. Or me. I was hoping he'd answer me, I suppose. Maybe that's why I asked a question I worked out a half a shift ago before I was willing to admit that I know better—

_When I SHOULD have warned Tron . . . . _

–And maybe that's why another question, one that I have no idea how to answer, pops out of my mouth next:

"Why?"

Rinzler's gaze becomes electric, zeroing in on me as if I have just screamed his name with all the power my systems are good for, and for a micro I feel as if I shouldn't be able to move, like he's pinned me there with his eyes long enough to inspect me from the most minute circuit to the most obvious detail.

For a nano I'm afraid that he'll actually answer me. Especially since Tron obviously can't. But I don't want to hear a word out of, out of that thing that took Tron from me for so many cycles, that killed so many . . . and liked it.

_Who saved my life . . ._

But Rinzler says nothing, and while he is silent, Tron pauses at last, and looks in my direction. In this moment, though, he's a blur of black suit and minimalist circuits to me, and all I can see is the ISO they're dragging out of the room. He turns his head back over his shoulder to look at me, a little piece of his hair falling into his eye as he does so though he seems not to notice. I'm all he's looking at, too, and I wonder what he's thinking, what he's trying to convey to me, as they lead him out.

Tron approaches as he leaves, and I watch him go over my counterpart's shoulder.

* * *

_Another author's note: _What, you didn't think I would leave without giving credit where it was due did you? I was just trying to keep my chatter to a minimum at the beginning of the chapter.

Anyway,_** my thanks to**__: _ScribeOfRED for beta-ing, and tumblr's Lizzy-Lue for proposing a fantastic bit of headcanon that, although it may not be evident yet how it factors in, allowed me to rationalize and finalize some important details in this chapter.

Also, shout outs to Userkaydee and Terrible-idea (as they are known on tumblr), as they have both made some seriously awesome ISO!Rinzler art over the last week or so, and have repeatedly made my day because of it.

-End of Line


	10. Consolation

Yori

* * *

He's not well—I can see it in the way he moves, even though he doesn't stop to try and talk to me. Instead, he moves to the control panel and starts opening up file after file, never finishing with any of them, as if by trying to do everything at once he can force the world back into a sense of order, as if it will make dead programs stay dead, and old code stay just that: code.

"Tron— "

He doesn't answer me. The helmet is still on, which is never a good sign. It means that there is something that he doesn't want me to see in his expression. I wish he wouldn't. I know that he must be conflicted; angry . . . Honestly, he's probably a mess. But he does that. I'm used to him retracting back into himself as if containing his pain, anger, and regret can somehow spare the rest of us the effects of it. It never does. But this . . . _I _don't know what to think of this. Had I not just seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it myself; there's a part of me that even now is struggling to process the visual input from a nano ago, which is intent on disproving it somehow.

_He was supposed to be dead . . ._

Well, dead is the term we've been using. Can something be dead that was only ever an extension of something else? I have always thought—and Tron has never corrected me— that Rinzler was more or less his own individual; that he had his own personality and his own guidelines and goals—most of which were enforced on him by Clu—that, though they had been twisted out of Tron's code, were too much a distortion to really _be _Tron anymore. I've always thought of him as a separate entity, albeit an entity who was like Tron in some ways, deep down, simply because he came from the same code, but I have never . . . It never occurred to me that one could exist without the other. That the files Tron is missing (mostly memory files and combat subroutines and a few of Clu's upgrades, including, of course, the filters, restrictions, and commands that held Rinzler back and forced him to cooperate) couldn't possibly be enough to create an entirely new program . . . let alone one that seems to be, well, _functional._

What _is_ he, an ISO with basic framework? Basic memories? Basic source code?

_How much of Tron is still in him?_

I wish I hadn't asked that question the moment I think it. It's too close to another question, one I used to ask myself a lot when Tron first returned but which—thankfully—I have had to ask less up until just now.

_How much of Rinzler is there in Tron?_

I shudder, suddenly overcome by the horrible sensation that I'm going to receive an answer to that question that I don't like.

Tron is still desperately trying to lose himself in the files in front of him, opening and digging through more sub-routines than our horribly overworked systems can handle. Another nano passes, and the control panel turns to static, an error warning flashing across every screen of the control center. For a moment, he just stands there and stares at it, almost shaking.

And then without warning he slams his fist down on the control panel, punching a pixelated gash into its surface. Several more warning alarms sound, turning the room to red and yellow and ringing loudly through the room.

He just stands there.

He doesn't even pick up his fist—he just leans into the panel, crunching more data under his weight, gripping the edge of it with his other hand, circuits pulsing with fury and users know what else. I step up behind him gingerly, reaching around him without touching him to silence the damage warnings.

He doesn't move. His helmet is impenetrable and black, and if he's looking at me, I can't tell.

I don't know what to say to him. He's in shock, and yet he's so _angry_, maybe, maybe even . . .

_. . . Is Tron afraid? _

I'm not sure I've ever seen him afraid of someone, so I can't say. Concerned, yes. Worried, yes. But really, truly frightened of another program? No. No, the only person he fears is—

_Is himself._

He doesn't talk about it. But I know. He still keeps himself from standby with his thoughts, dwelling on what he did as Rinzler, on what he never did to stop Clu, of the ways his resistance failed, and the games. He tries never to talk about Clu's games. All he'll admit about those memories is that they are dominated by a few very specific emotions: Joy, pleasure, and liberation. Despite all the killing that they involved.

I don't know how to tell him that if he's somehow blaming himself for this, he's insane, that there was no way he could have known the sea would use R_inzler _of all programs as a template for an ISO, that the sea could even still _make _ISOs. I don't know how to tell him that we can get this under control, that it's not too late. I don't know how to tell him that this won't be the end of us, or that I at least need him to believe it won't be. I don't know how to ease the pain he's in, because I can't even begin to understand it. I'm not sure even he does.

So I don't say anything. Instead, I stand close behind him, and run my hands along his broad shoulders. He doesn't react, so I wrap my arms around him completely, resting my cheek against the back of his shoulder and allowing my eyes to fall shut. After a moment he turns his head to look at me, and the helmet finally comes down. I almost wish it hadn't. His eyes are conflicted, full and overloading, and they look so desperate despite his hard expression. I can't look at them for long. Instead I sneak under his arm, wedging myself between him and the control panel. I take his face in my hands, and lower his head so that his forehead rests against mine.

We stay like that for what seems like a long time, and it isn't long enough.

* * *

**Author's note: **Chapter ten, woohoo! Thank you to all of you who have been reading, extra thanks to those of you who have been reviewing, and extra extra thanks to Cyberbutterfly and ScribeOfRED for betaing this chapter!

Also, I now have a fic (it's one chapter long now but will develop alongside this one) posted called "Meanwhile in the Real World" that follow Sam, Quorra, Lora, and Alan and the events that unfold OUTSIDE of the grid while Rinzler wreaks havoc inside of it. It will intercept with Regensis later on, and all of those characters will also show up here later, but for now you can keep up with the users' perspectives via "Meanwhile". :)

Anyway, once again, thanks for reading!

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	11. Hostage

Rinzler

* * *

I am steaming, a slow boil.

I can't get my feet under me, can't catch myself when they drag me into this horrible tiny room with its dents in the walls, holes from my discs Clu never patched even after he'd stolen the memory of how I'd put them there. Of why.

He always liked to taunt me.

I can't stop them from stowing me in here, can't stand or run or _cut them down _for all of my thrashing. They drag me bodily into the cell, fingers digging into my arms, their rapid cycling manifested by heavy breath in my ears. I loathe this place.

I loathe this place and they do not care.

I loathe this room because I remember it. It crashes back to me. An onslaught more than a memory, I _know this room._

_This was my room._

No, not this room. Room is the wrong word. This _cell. _It's a prison. Not a choice. Not a home.

_Don't put me back in here._

This is the hole where Clu kept me.

_DON'T YOU LEAVE ME IN HERE— _

He caged me when he didn't need me. His enforcer, his bodyguard, his murderer on call, his torturer. His executioner that he could take out and put away as he liked.

They pull me through the doorway. They push me across the room. I can't throw them off, can't break their gripping fingers or kick their legs from under them of unclench my jaw long enough to speak, to tell them _no no no no, _that I won't stand for this, that I won't stand for this . . .

_I won't be able to stand this. . ._

They drop me in a heap on the hard, jutting chunk of code along the wall. It is all that serves as a bed: a cold hunk of pixels so hard it hurts to lie on, protruding from the wall in space-wasting rectangular wedge.

I try to stand, to lift myself off this sad excuse for a resting place and hurtle myself at them. But I can't. I only succeed in rolling onto my side, a useless, helpless heap while everything I've managed to forget pours back into me in an unstoppable flood.

This is not how freedom is supposed to taste. To feel.

This is a lie and a tease and a cheat.

I was not supposed to come back here. To this. To captivity and rage and the crawling inescapable panic that is rising in my throat, panic because I can't move, can't fight, can't speak—

Clu erased my voice, once. Then he locked me in here, a shell of a program full of pain and rage and the weight of duty, made heavy by the need to serve to please to _murder_ . . . left me alone in my head, choking on my silence to the backdrop of all of their beautiful screaming; a vision of perfection so fantastically warped and twisted and dark. A monster, a beautiful monster. A pathetic broken thing.

. . . A perfect broken thing.

That is what I was.

_IsThatWhatIAm—_

That is all I ever was, and the truth of it paralyzes me and I wonder if –past the cold violence of my snarl—they can see the desperation that must be hiding in my eyes.

_Don't leave me in here…_

Don't leave me here with my head. Don't leave me alone with these memories. Don't leave me to face what I am.

Nothing frightens me more.

* * *

_Author's note: _Many thanks to Lightdiscjockey for doing some final edits on this one on VERY short notice, and to Cyberbutterfly as well.

Sorry this is so short, but I am all kinds of stuck right now, so I thought it'd be better to post a short something than nothing at all. Here's hoping it wasn't too much of a disappointment. :P

In other news: I finally got an account on Ao3! I haven't posted much to it yet, but I'm going to start moving some things over this week so that you guys have the option of reading on whichever interface you prefer, just thought I'd let you know.

Anyway, thank you all for reading!

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